Top 15 Largest Diamonds Discovered This Century 

In this history, Diamonds are the first mineral on earth to be preserved and have captured man’s imagination more than any other mineral. Diamonds are a geological marvel which was created by nature itself, some four billion years ago. India was the only supplier of diamonds up to 1725 after which Brazil was discovered to have diamond mines.

Millions of carats of diamonds were thus sought and recovered through digging till diamond mining was deemed to be the popular technique to recover diamonds. The rough diamond is categorized, cut and polished and are then incorporated in your brilliant piece of jewelry.

Top 15 Largest Diamonds Discovered This Century 

#1. Cullinan Diamond

The Cullinan is perhaps the most well known of all large diamonds – and but without a doubt, it is also one of the biggest. It was found in 1905 by the officials during the inspection of the Premier mine in South Africa. They named the 3,106. After the mine’s owner, Sir Thomas Cullinan, it came to be called the 75-carat Cullinan diamond. He took the diamond to King Edward VII since the mine was located in British territory. 

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#2. Sewelo Diamond

The Sewelo that translates to mean ‘the rare find’ in the Setswana language is the second biggest diamond ever found in the world. The popular rough diamond was found in 2019 by Lucara Diamond Corp a Canada based diamond mining company at its Karowe operation. The 1,758-carat rough diamond was about as big as a tennis ball. First, it seemed to be black since it was coated with a thin layer of black carbon. This meant that it was only possible to assess the quality of diamond, by cutting through it as a means of getting acquainted with the kind of diamond the client wanted. 

#3. Lesedi La Rona Diamond

Nine employees of Lucara discovered this 1,109-carat, colorless diamond in 2015 at its Karowe mine. When found it was the biggest diamond discovered in over a century, and only second to the Cullinan diamond. It was bought by Laurence Graff in 2017 for $53m for his jewelry house brand GRAFF, and it took gemologists of the company several months to examine the diamond before they began to cut it. Because the diamond was too large to fit in the company’s existing scanning equipment and software, Graff’s technicians required new ones. 

#4. Lucara Diamond

The Karowe mine saw Lucara discover its namesake diamond in the year 2021. It has a dimension of 77mm by 55mm by 33mm but it is not a 100 % gem quality diamond. In its stead, the company refers to it as a clivage gem of variable quality that has large areas of high quality white gem material. 

#5. Jwaneng Diamond

This diamond was discovered in 2021 through working people at the Jwaneng mine in Botswana and it weighed 1,098 carats. The currently operating mine of Debswana Diamond Company is jointly owned by De Beers and the government of Botswana. The diamond – known as the Jwaneng – is the biggest gem-quality diamond ever found by the company. It was eventually extracted by Debswana and offered to the president of Botswana Mokgweetsi Eric Masisi 

#6. Karowe Diamond

The recovery of this 1,080-carat rough diamond was done by Lucara in 2023 at the Karowe mine. It must be mentioned that at the time of this writing the company had not given it a name of its own. The valuable treasure is that this stone is one of the biggest colorless diamonds in the world. It is of comparable size and shade to the Lesedi La Rona from the Karowe mine, and expected to be worth around $50 million. 

#7. Excelsior Diamond: 995 carats

Employees unearthed a blue-white 995-carat rough gem diamond in 1893 when one of them shoveled gravel into a loading truck at the Jagersfontein mine in present-day South Africa. Originally, the diamond had an unusual shape: On a certain part of the formation, it was simply a straight line rising to a line that curved upwards. 

#8. Star of Sierra Leone Diamond

The Star of Sierra Leone is one of the largest alluvial diamonds, which is found in Sierra Leone. Alluvial diamonds are those that have been shifted from their original location being the primary deposit to a body of water as a result of actions such as wind, rain or water currents over some time. Miners stumbled on it on February 14, 1972 at the Diminico alluvial mine in the Koidu region of Sierra Leone. 

#9. Lesotho Legend Diamond

Diamonds and other colored gemstones are the core of every house of high-jewelry. This is true especially for the Mystery Set Jewels by Van Cleef & Arpels: a jewelry collection entirely carved from the Lesotho Legend, a 910-carat rough diamond. The Lesotho Legend diamond was found in 2018 at Letseng mine in South Africa by the workers. 

#10. Incomparable Diamond

The 890-carat diamond shown here was discovered in the early 1980s by a young girl in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She took it to her uncle who took it to the local diamond buyers. It was first bought by a group of Lebanese buyers. It was later bought by De Beers and subsequently sold to the Zale Corporation of America. 

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#11. Constellation Diamond

The Karowe mine showed the discovery of the 812-carat Constellation diamond in 2015 by Lucara. Dubai-based Nemesis International diamond trading company allied with Swiss jewelers de Grisogno and bought the latter in 2016 for $ 63m. 1 million. This bargain holds the record of the largest amount of money paid per carat ($77,649) for a rough diamond. Of the eight diamonds fashioned from the Constellation, one of the diamonds cut is an emerald of 313 carats. 

#12. Millennium Star Diamond

This 777-carat diamond has its origin in 1990 at the Mbuji-Mayi mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was bought by De Beers in the early to mid-1990s and the Steinmetz Diamond Group drove the cutting. Three years and 100 plastic replicas later, Steinmetz cutters forged a pear-shaped 203 carat diamond called the Millennium Star. In 1999, De Beers put it at the core of the Millennium diamond collection to mark one hundred years since the company began. 

#13. Golden Jubilee Diamond

The Golden Jubilee was discovered in 1985 in the Premier mine, South Africa by the De Beers workers, the same mine as that of Cullinan origin. It settled for hiring Gabriel Tokowsky to chop 755. Five carats of polished diamond, and this took two years. The outcome was a very attractive 545. 65-carat gold-brown diamond. The GIA rated it as the world’s largest cut and faceted gemstone. 

#14. Excelsior Diamond

Previously the largest diamond was the Excelsior Diamond of South Africa found at Pretoria. It is believed that in 1893, a worker that was on duty through shoveling gravel onto a loading truck on the Jagersfontein mine in South Africa staked araw during the process. The thing was, the diamond was not of the usual round shape at the beginning.

#15. Peace Diamond

Of all the stones in our top 15, the Peace Diamond stands out as the luckiest find of them all. Many locals in Sierra Leone search for diamonds as a way to earn a living, and in 2017, a team of artisanal diggers hired by Pastor Emmanuel Momoh, struck it lucky in Koryardu, a village with no running water or electricity. 

In the end 

It might mean there could be more epic diamonds somewhere, a lot deeper in the ground, somewhere waiting to be discovered. When the next record-breaking stone will be introduced remains to be seen.

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