A Look at the DeYoung Red Diamond

This exquisite diamond weighs 5.03 carats and is cut as a modified round brilliant. Having a fancy dark red coloration carrying slight brownish hue, this gem looks a lot like a rhodolite garnet. There was actually an incident where someone sold mistakenly sold this gem as a rhodolite garnet. Its clarity grade is VS2, which is very slightly included, which means all inclusions remain invisible unless the stone is viewed under magnification. With all that, this stone is obviously worth a lot more than the center stone on your average 5-carat princess cut diamond ring.

The DeYoung Red, while graded Type IIa for clarity, carried plastic deformation in its crystal structure. That – and not the presence of any significant amount of nitrogen – is the reason for its coloration. Still, it is in a group that forms just 2% of all naturally formed diamonds. It is also the third biggest red diamond in the whole world.

Sidney Young donated this as well as a 2.86-carat Tanzanian-mined pink diamond to the Smithsonian in 1987. The Natural History Museum is where these two stones are exhibited beside each other.