Flawless 100-carat diamond fetches $22.1 million at auction

The famous 100-carat diamond. — (Image credit: Twitter.com/newyorkolizer)

A flawless 100-carat diamond sold for a cool $22.1 million in New York on Tuesday, Sotheby's auction house said.

The dazzling diamond was mined by De Beers in southern Africa, and is about the size of a walnut, Reuters reports. It once weighed more than 200 carats, but its owner spent over a year changing its cut and polish. The rock — purchased over the phone by an anonymous buyer — is so spectacular that it forces people to gush over its beauty. "The color is whiter than white, it is free of any internal perfections, and so transparent that I can only compare it to a pool of water," said Gary Schuler, head of Sotheby's jewelry department in New York.

While $22.1 million is a huge sum of money, it doesn't shatter any records: In 2013, a 118.28 carat white diamond sold in Hong Kong for $30.6 million.

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.