Gem Profile 19: Purple & Violet Diamonds: 
View past Profiles...  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10  11  12  13  14  15  16  17  18     20  21  22  23  24  25  26

PURPLE & VIOLET DIAMOND: KISSING COUSINS

    If colorless diamonds are the perfect expression of conspicuous consumption-the term coined for lavish purchases meant to boost one’s social standing or impress others-then the colored diamonds represent a serene status beyond shows of wealth and taste. Let’s call is inconspicuous consumption.

     At this level, spending is transcendent and the finer things money can buy don’t have to be public archetypes of glory or glamour. To the contrary, their prestige is purely private. It suffices that the owner knows what they are. Recognition of their true nature and value by others does not add much to the pleasure of owning them. Indeed, it may lessen and possibly negate it. Just listen to designer Jean Mahie, who has worked exclusively for Neiman-Marcus for the past 32 years, talk about her favorite gem: the violet diamond.

 “I love the idea that no one knows that the small grayish-lavender stone I am wearing is a diamond,” she says, “It is my secret and mine alone.”

     If Mahie wants her most treasured keepsake to be recognition-resistant, she made the right choice. Violet diamonds are the ultimate obscurity-so rare even the few who know about them hardly expect to see them worn. Mahie owns four and they are usually not for public display either in a museum or on her person. They are simply her four favorite diamonds in a growing personal collection of fancy colors that now numbers 75 stones.

     Can you guess Mahie’s fifth favorite diamond in her collection? It’s a specimen of her second favorite gem: the purple diamond.

     To most people violet is a synonym for purple. So splitting the two colors into separate categories makes no sense at all. But to gem researchers like Emmanuel Fritsch at the University of Nantes in France who have studied the causes of color in diamonds, such interchangeability of color terms is a serious gemological mistake.

     According to Fritsch, purple diamonds owe their color to lattice-level deformations which manifest as mysterious color-exuding grain lines throughout the stone. Violet diamonds, on the other hand, owe their color to minute traces of hydrogen. “From a gemological standpoint, there is every reason to differentiate violet from purple diamonds,” Frisch says. Connoisseurs like Mahie who are practiced in the defining subtleties of fancy color diamonds say there are equally compelling aesthetic reasons for distinguishing between the two hues.

     A water colorist as well as a jewelry maker, Mahie draws sharp graphic distinctions between the two types of diamonds she most loves. “Violet diamonds remind me of stormy skies at dusk filled with blue-gray lavender clouds,” she says. “Purple diamonds with their pinkish tones remind me of Alpine flowers with fuschia colors.”

     In other words, violet diamonds tend toward blue and purple diamonds tend toward red or pink. New York dealer and master collection builder Alan Bronstein, Mahie’s mentor for the past ten years, seconds the distinction. “It’s no accident that the most famous limerick in English begins, ’Roses are red, violets are blue,’ “ he says. “There’s good sound science in that verse. I would add, ‘Lilacs are purple.’ “

 CROSSING COLOR BOUNDARIES

    The fuss over violet and purple diamonds is recent as far as controversies go. Collectors of fancy color diamonds could only dream of owning these colors until the discovery of violet diamonds in Australia in the 1980’s, and a fluke find of purples in Russia a decade later. Yet even then, scientists doubted their eyes.

     Indeed, Collecting and Classifying Fancy Coloured Diamonds refuses to recognize the violet diamond as a separate and distinct category. But it’s not because such stones are too purple. It’s because they’re too blue. Author Stephen Hofer says that at the time of the book’s publication in 1998 he had not yet found any diamonds that measured in the violet region of the spectrum using an electronic colorimeter. To him, most violet stones measured in the blue and were best classified as such. Today, however, he would include a chapter on violet diamonds in the book because he has finally found a diamond that fully measures up.

     Ironically, Bronstein, whose famous Aurora Collection of fancy colored diamonds is the main subject of Hofer’s book, already felt violet was a proven diamond color before the book was finished. “Your eye just told you that what you were seeing was violet and that it was distinct from blue.,” he says.

     Mahie agrees. “Violet and purple are like feelings,” she explains. “Most of the grading reposts describe violet stones as combinations of gray and blue. Yet somehow the color that you see adds up to violet. You would never mistake this color for purple, which usually has pink in it.”

     The controversy over violet and purple diamonds became very timely once again after basketball superstar Kobe Bryant gave his wife an 8-carat purple diamond costing $4 million as an atonement gift shortly after being charged with sexual assault late in July.

     Collectors of fancy color diamonds would love to feast their eyes on this stone. “Purple and violet diamonds both tend to be small with sizes rarely topping 2 carats,” says one who asked that his name be withheld. “Kobe’s wife got a record holder of a stone. And it’s a record I don’t think will soon be broken. I just wish that one she’s done admiring it she loans her rock to a museum so the world can see that one of the world’s rarest diamond colors is also one of the most beautiful.”

Modern Jeweler September 2003 
By David Federman

Return to Homepage