The Premier Rose Diamond () was one of the large rare gems produced by

Premier Mine The Premier Mine is an underground diamond mine owned by Petra Diamonds in the town of Cullinan, east of Pretoria, Gauteng Province, South Africa. Established in 1902, it was renamed the Cullinan Diamond Mine in November 2003 in celebratio ...

, of

De Beers De Beers Group is an international corporation that specializes in diamond mining, diamond exploitation, diamond retail, diamond trading and industrial diamond manufacturing sectors. The company is active in open-pit, large-scale alluvial and c ...

in South Africa.

History

The Premier Rose Diamond was mined in March 1978. It was purchased by

Mouw Diamond Cutting Mouw is a Dutch surname. Notable people with the surname include: *Johan Andreas Dèr Mouw (1863–1919), Dutch poet and philosopher * Richard Mouw (born 1940), American theologian and philosopher See also *Mow (surname) Mow is a Chinese surname ...

in Johannesburg through a partnership with William Goldberg of New York City. The diamond was marked for bisection by Rose Mouw, the spouse of Jacob Mouw, the founder of Mouw Diamond Cutting.

Cutting

Frans Swanepoel was responsible for the sawing of the diamond and the cleaving of the lesser half of the diamond was done by Sylvain Mouw and Jacques Mouw. Marcel Cilliers Smulders was the apprentice who assisted with the cutting. The polishing of the two main diamonds of 137.02 (Big Rose) and 31.48 (Little Rose) ct. was done by David du Plessis (who was also responsible for polishing The Golden Jubilee and was one of the main polishers of the

Centenary Diamond The De Beers Centenary Diamond is, at , the third-largest diamond to have been produced in the Premier Mine. Among top-color diamonds, only the Cullinan I and II are larger than the Centenary diamond. The Centenary Diamond is rated in color ...

), and the Baby Rose was done by Mike Botha and Willem Joubert. The stones resulting from the original stone have been named the Premier Rose family, with the largest retaining the name of Premier Rose Diamond. The Premier Rose collection ranks among the finest polished gems in the world and became the benchmark in symmetry and proportions for large fancy cut diamonds.

Name

The diamond was subsequently named after the

Premier mine The Premier Mine is an underground diamond mine owned by Petra Diamonds in the town of Cullinan, east of Pretoria, Gauteng Province, South Africa. Established in 1902, it was renamed the Cullinan Diamond Mine in November 2003 in celebratio ...

and Rose Mouw, hence the name Premier Rose.

Details

This diamond had no inclusions, and it was an unmistakably colourless gem. The diamond did not display a definite

crystallographic Crystallography is the experimental science of determining the arrangement of atoms in crystalline solids. Crystallography is a fundamental subject in the fields of materials science and solid-state physics (condensed matter physics). The word ...

habit and was often incorrectly referred to as a 'cleavage piece'. If a resin model of the diamond is studied however, one would find no evidence of mechanical or natural cleavage on the diamond. The morphology of this diamond was due to plastic deformation during the eruption phase of the kimberlite. The diamond did not exhibit any trigons on the octahedral faces (111) or noticeable striae on the dodecahedral faces (110) and the crystallographic orientation was derived from the presence of two orthogonal inversions on one of the hexahedral faces (100).

External links

Premier Rose Diamond at Jacques Mouw website
{{coord, 34.0685, -118.4044, type:landmark_source:enwiki-googlemaplink, display=title De Beers Diamonds originating in South Africa Individual diamonds