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A “Mirror Diamond” necklace bearing five table-cut Mughal-empire diamonds from the early 17th century has been offered for private sale at a price of $20 million by the London auction house Bonhams.

The necklace is considered one of the most important and valuable pieces of Mughal jewelry ever seen on the market and reflects a period when the Mughals controlled most of the Indian subcontinent.

At 28 carats, the central stone is the largest mirror or table-cut diamond in existence, and the five diamonds (ranging from 16 to 28 carats) are the largest known matching set of table-cut diamonds from the Mughal 17th century. It is most likely that the diamonds belonged to a Mughal emperor.

To both Mughal emperors and Indian maharajas, the quality and size of the gem were of paramount importance. Because gem cutters worked toward achieving the largest size possible, they typically removed only cracks and inclusions. The cutting strategies of that era often resulted in gems with irregular and asymmetrical shapes.

The five table-cut diamonds featured in the necklace have a flat top and bottom, with facets around the edge. This faceting acts as a border around the irregular shape of the diamond and produces a refractive brilliance. The Gemological Institute of America has speculated that the five near colorless diamonds were cut from the same crystal.

In the necklace’s current form, each diamond is encased in delicate gold frames adorned with Colombian emerald drops. The whole thing is woven in a gold and ivory silk cord. Bonhams reported that the emeralds were likely added during the late 18th or early 19th century.

It is very rare and remarkable that the Mughal Mirror Diamond necklace has survived with its gemstones intact. Much of India’s royal jewelry has been subjected to the aesthetics and new cutting techniques of the 19th and early 20th century, with gemstones often refaceted into more modern shapes.

“What makes [the table-cut diamonds] so remarkable –  the rarity, if you like – is that they have not been Westernized,” explained Matthew Girling, chief executive officer of Bonhams and head of its jewelry unit.

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Memo to Brad Pitt: The next time you spend a full year designing an engagement ring for your significant other you may want to take note of her favorite gemstone.

It’s been only a few weeks since the world got its first peek at the $500,000 emerald-cut diamond ring that Brad Pitt personally designed for Angelina Jolie. The platinum engagement ring boasted a 7-carat emerald-cut center diamond accented with 9 carats of tapered emerald-cut diamonds encircling the platinum band.

Here’s the problem… 

“She isn’t fond of it,” a friend confided to In Touch magazine. “Nothing against Brad’s design. She’s just never been enamored of white diamonds.”

Ouch! The friend added that Jolie had been hoping for a less traditional stone. “Emeralds are her favorite,” the friend said, adding that Jolie’s been complaining that Pitt’s choice of a diamond centerstone, rather than an emerald, “shows how little he knows her.”

Casual followers of Jolie would notice how much she loves to wear emeralds and how great she looks while wearing them. The photo above, for instance, shows Jolie looking ravishing in emerald drop earrings at the 2009 Oscars.

Jolie is not the only celebrity who has coveted a non-traditional engagement ring.

In mid-March, Halle Berry unveiled her 4-carat emerald engagement ring. The emerald is flanked by two diamonds in a yellow-gold setting “forged according to ancient Phoenician tradition,” said its designer.

Back in 1953, the fashion-forward former first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, received a diamond and emerald engagement ring from John F. Kennedy, who was a U.S. Senator at the time. The ring consisted of one 2.88-carat diamond mounted next to a 2.84-carat emerald with tapered baguettes. In 1962, a total weight of 0.66 carats of round diamonds and 1.46 carats of marquise diamonds were added to the ring.

If Pitt decides to reconsider his choice of engagement ring, he may take note of one of the most famous and lavish emerald rings of all time. Once the prize of Claire Chalk, wife of Oscar Roy Chalk, the renowned New York entrepreneur, The Chalk Emerald is a 37.82-carat, square-cut emerald set in platinum and surrounded by 60 pear-shaped colorless diamonds with a total weight of 15 carats. The ring currently resides at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution.

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C.J. Wise and Elizabeth Daves say they do pretty much everything together. In fact, when the couple took part in the Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon on Sunday in matching orange t-shirts, it was their third time running 26.2 miles together. After crossing the finish line, Daves was in the for shock of her life when her boyfriend went down to one knee – but it wasn’t from exhaustion.

The local police officer asked his police dispatcher girlfriend to be his wife. Once Daves got over the initial shock, she said “yes.”

Wise ran all 26.2 miles with the ring in his pocket. “The last mile I got it out and was holding it. Once we crossed the finish line, that’s when I did it,” Wise told Koco.com.

Wise presented his bride-to-be with a classic three-stone engagement ring. The Victorian design has become a favorite for modern couples in recent years. The rich symbolism of one stone for the past, one for the present, and one for the future makes the three-stone ring the ideal choice for couples to proclaim that their love will stand the test of time.

Although the three-stone design was first reintroduced to the American jewelry lover as an anniversary band, it was such a great look, and had so much symbolic resonance behind it, that it quickly moved to the A list among engagement ring styles with modern brides.

Typically, a three-stone ring worn as an engagement ring will have the middle diamond slightly raised and larger than the two stones that flank it. The police officer chose a split-shank style in white precious metal, accented with pavé diamonds.

“I was excited for the marathon,” said Wise, “but I was even more excited because I knew what was waiting at the end.”

On Sunday, Wise and Daves stayed together during the entire race and finished at the same time. Looks like this couple has many marathons in their future.

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Mixed with fashion and spirituality, Shamballa bracelets have been made famous and worn by many a-list celebrities and hip hop artists. Shamballa bracelets by Bon make the perfect Mother’s Day or Graduation gift. Not only are they trendy but they are believed to support peace, tranquility and happiness. So you can say ‘I love you’ to that special someone by offering them jewelry that is unique and good for the soul.
You can pick up a Shamballa Bracelet by Bon at Ben David Jewelers. To give you the look you want, Bon is available in 6 Classic Collections. Bon are proven authentic with their original Bon signature stamping on each individual bracelet. The Bon Collection Bracelets are unisex and feature a 7.25? – 9? adjustable closure.

Bon bracelets are the latest in trend-setting fashion. The inspired designs, with roots in the Tibetan mythology, were first spotted on the “who’s who” of Hollywood culture. Shamballa bracelets have become the hands-down biggest accessory trend. The great thing about Shamballa bracelets is that there are so many different styles and colors to choose from, so you can accessorize while keeping your personal tastes and preferences in mind.

File this one under “bizarre.” The Associated Press reported last night that a Florida woman was successfully reunited with her lost $90,000 diamond ring after she and her husband placed a classified ad in the Pensacola News Journal.

The saga began on April 22 when the woman took off her 5.02-carat diamond engagement ring to wash her hands at a local restaurant and mistakenly left it in the restroom. When she realized her pricey mistake 20 minutes later, the ring was gone.

“We were both frantic,” said the husband, who asked not to be identified. “And my wife was just sick about it.”

Fox News reported that the couple then sought the help of the local police, a private investigator, and even questioned local jewelers and pawn shop owners in an attempt to recover the valuable and precious heirloom.

With prospects dwindling, the couple decided to place a classified ad in the April 28 edition of their local newspaper, offering a “large reward” for the lost ring with “no questions asked.”

In an amazing turn of fortune, a reader connected the lost ring mentioned in the ad to a ring her friend had found in the same restaurant. The friend immediately turned the ring over to the local authorities, explaining that she thought it was a piece of costume jewelry.

The woman refused the reward, saying that she did not want to get into trouble.

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It’s May 1 and time to review the birthstone of the month – emerald. Congratulations to all of our readers whose birthdays are in May because your birthstone is fabulous, empowering, unique, beautiful and incomparable. The gemstone has been coveted for more than 4,000 years and even Cleopatra was said to be an avid collector.

Emeralds are steeped in symbolism and mysticism. Ancients believed emeralds could allow the wearer to see into the future. Others believed it was a talisman of good fortune. To many, emeralds symbolize rebirth and the regeneration of life in the springtime. Each emerald has its own “fingerprint,” a network of natural inclusions that resemble foliage. The French call this the jardin, or garden.

One of the world’s largest and most famous emeralds is the “Gachala Emerald” (shown above). Weighing in at an astounding 858 carats, the gem-quality treasure that has been called “one of the most beautiful emerald gemstones ever known” was discovered in 1967 at the Vega de San Juan mine in Colombia and is named for district in which the mine the located. The uncut gem exhibits a dark vivid green color and is a bit larger than a golf ball – 5 cm by 5 cm.

The Gachala mines have been responsible for producing other spectacular emeralds, including the 7,025-carat “Emilia Emerald” and the 16,020-carat “El Monstro Emerald.”

The “Gachala Emerald” makes its home at the National Museum of Natural History, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. It was donated in 1969 by the famed New York jeweler, Harry Winston.

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If we posted this story on the first of April you’d certainly think that we were pulling an April Fools prank, but this is as real as real gets.

The founders of a brand new enterprise called Planetary Resources revealed to the world on Tuesday that they have a plan to mine nearby asteroids for their rich content of precious metals, specifically platinum. Peter Diamandis, Chris Lewicki and Eric Anderson (below) made the announcement at a news conference Tuesday at the Museum of Flight in Seattle.

If successful, the endeavor could yield billions, perhaps trillions, in riches. Investors from the ranks of the super-wealthy are already on board. The company says investors include Google co-founder Larry Page, Google chairman Eric Schmidt, Google investor K. Ram Shriram, former Microsoft chief software engineer Charles Simonyi, and H. Ross Perot Jr., son of the former presidential candidate.

Serving as an adviser is Hollywood’s James Cameron, the man behind the blockbuster films “Titanic” and “Avatar.”

Certainly the technical challenges and risk factors of mining precious metal in outer space will be off the charts, but the billionaires behind Planetary Resources see a huge upside. They estimate that robots could be extracting cosmic riches within 10 years.

How do scientists know for certain that platinum is present on these asteroids? The simplest clues come from space rocks that have fallen to the Earth as meteoroids. They also utilize equipment that detects the distinct chemical signatures of the asteroids based on reflected light.

They believe a small asteroid about 79-feet long could have as much as 33,000 tons of extractable metal and possibly one ton of platinum group metals, according to a report in the April-May issue of the journal Acta Astronautica.

The Associated Press reported that there are approximately 1,500 asteroids – from a dozen feet wide to 10 miles long – that pass near Earth regularly and would be excellent initial targets. Scientists believe that 10 percent of these will yield valuable minerals.

“Since my early teenage years, I’ve wanted to be an asteroid miner. I always viewed it as a glamorous vision of where we could go,” said Peter Diamandis at the news conference. The company’s vision “is to make the resources of space available to humanity.”

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Who is this gentleman and why is he smiling? Well, Brett Stettner, a diamond dealer and head of a diamond investment fund, stunned the auction world last week when – within a 24-hour period – he purchased two highly prized colored diamonds for a combined $18 million. The successful bids were made at back-to-back events at New York’s Sotheby’s and Christie’s.

On April 17 at Christie’s, Stettner placed the winning bid of $15.7 million for The Clark Pink, a 9-carat cushion-cut purplish pink diamond from the estate of the reclusive heiress Huguette Clark. The bid shattered the pre-auction estimate of $6 to $8 million and set a record for the highest price ever paid for a pink diamond sold at auction in the U.S., according to JCK Magazine.

Only one day later, Stettner secured a 3.54-carat marquise-shaped fancy blue diamond ring for $2.4 million at Sotheby’s. The piece sold for nearly five times the pre-auction high estimate of $500,000. JCK Magazine reported that the purchase price of $687,712 per carat was a world record per-carat price for a fancy blue diamond, topping the 20.17-carat fancy blue diamond ring that sold for $490,952 per carat at Sotheby’s in October 1994.

An amateur treasure hunter who’s recovered tens of thousands of uncut emeralds deep in the Gulf waters off Florida’s west coast, is living the life of a pauper – $10 million in debt, sleeping in a bunk bed in his friend’s spare room and years away from cashing in on the bounty.

This is the bizarre story of Jay Miscovich, a retired doctor and thrill seeker, who purchased a treasure map from a diver friend for $500 and eventually netted a treasure trove of more than 65,000 uncut emeralds said to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. His story was the subject of a segment on Sunday night’s installment of “60 Minutes.”

Armen Keteyian reported that, on the surface, the story seems too good to be true: amateur treasure hunter bags one of the largest discoveries of sunken treasure in history. But this is where the fairy tale starts to break down. Miscovich made his discovery in 2010 and since then has be embroiled in legal battles with investors, other treasure hunters and the U.S. government.

During the CBS segment, Miscovich poured out a laundry basket full of emeralds, about 30 pounds of the 80 pounds already recovered. Unfortunately for the treasure hunter, he may not sell a single specimen until the legal wrangling has been settled.

Although Miscovich believes the emeralds were from an ancient shipwreck, new evidence is pointing to a much different scenario. A company that was looking to market Miscovich’s emeralds sent a few dozen to Europe for special testing. They learned that some of the gems had been treated with a jeweler’s polish or epoxy, a technique first developed about 50 years ago to routinely enhance the brightness of emeralds.

Marine archeologist Duncan Mathewson told “60 Minutes” that some of Miscovich’s emeralds were scattered near the metal beams of a merchant ship that sunk during World War II. Mathewson researched the ship’s manifest, but emeralds weren’t listed as an official cargo.

Miscovich’s lawyer argued to a federal court judge in Key West that Miscovich should maintain temporary custody of everything he finds, but it could be years before the court awards full ownership.

With investor interest completely dried up, the treasure hunter is currently about $10 million in debt and is living in his dive partner’s spare room and sleeping in a kid-sized bunk bed with his feet hanging over the edge.

How’s that for an American rags-to-riches to rags story?

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