The Most Expensive Stone on Earth

今注目を集めている The Most Expensive Stone on Earthについて、詳しいまとめを整理して公開しています。

Hold onto your mug. A single cut, gem-quality Painite can fetch $50,000 to $60,000 per carat. Yes, per carat. A small pea-sized stone? That’s a down payment on a house in some places.

Most Expensive Gemstones in the World - Most Valuable Gemstones

To compare: top-tier diamonds are around $15,000 a carat. So Painite is roughly four times more expensive. It makes a diamond look like costume jewelry from a vending machine.

But don’t go selling your grandma’s pearls yet. You can’t just find this stuff. It’s almost exclusive to one region in Myanmar, and mining it is tough. Most pieces are still microscopic or too fractured to cut.

The plot twist: it got “less” rare

In the early 2000s, new deposits were found in Myanmar. The price actually dropped a bit. “A bit” meaning from “impossible to afford” to “only for the wildly rich.”

Today, maybe a few thousand crystals exist. Compare that to rubies or sapphires, which exist in the millions. Painite is still a unicorn with a price tag.

And get this: most Painite you see for sale is in rough form. Cut stones are so rare that jewelers who work with them basically treat them like biohazards. One slip and you’ve ruined a carat of wealth.