A Record-Setting Royal Ring
A ring containing a diamond that once belonged to a famous French queen sold for nearly $14 million.
Nationalmuseum, Sweden, Courtesy of CHRISTIE’S IMAGES LTD. (2025); Photo composite by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
The left side of this image shows Marie-Antoinette (center) and her daughter, Marie-Thérèse. The right side of the image shows the royal family’s pink diamond, which is now part of a ring.
A massive pink diamond ring with ties to French royalty has broken an auction record, selling for nearly $14 million. Estimates had indicated the ring would sell for between $5 and $7 million.
The ring’s pink gemstone has a historic and intriguing legacy, having once belonged to Marie-Antoinette of France, the country’s last queen before the French Revolution of 1789. How the gem survived the Revolution is still a mystery, but it went to Marie-Antoinette’s daughter, Marie-Thérèse. As a result, the diamond is called the Marie-Thérèse Pink.
Marie-Antoinette was the queen consort of King Louis XVI. In the years leading up to the Revolution, there was growing unrest and anger with the royals and aristocracy for extravagant spending and restricting the rights of the people. With the start of the Revolution on July 14, 1789, the people sought to change the country, set up a constitution, and restrict the monarchy’s rule. Marie-Antoinette urged her husband to resist these changes, which made her deeply unpopular among the common people. This is part of the sentiment behind the infamous legend that when Marie-Antoinette was told the people had no bread to eat, she responded, “Let them eat cake!”
Eventually Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were imprisoned and executed in Paris.
While the sequence of events surrounding the diamond is uncertain, experts think Marie-Antoinette sent the diamond and other jewels with a trusted coiffeur, or hairdresser, one night when the royals had tried to escape Paris before imprisonment. The escape attempt failed, but the pink jewel made its way out. It was reunited with Marie-Antoinette’s only surviving child, Marie-Thérèse, after the Revolution.
Marie-Thérèse passed the diamond on to other family members before it was sold in 1996. The buyer had the gem turned into a ring by well-known jewelry designer Joel Arthur Rosenthal, who is known as JAR. The diamond stayed out of public view until Christie’s New York’s Magnificent Jewels auction this summer.
“It has everything you could want in a piece of jewelry,” says Rahul Kadakia, Christie’s international head of jewelry. “The stone—likely from the prized Indian region of Golconda—has several shades of soft colors, flashing purple and pink from different angles. And it’s been transformed into a masterpiece by JAR, all while carrying the splendor of royal provenance.”
