David Bennett

Planet formation theory is pretty important even if you are only interested in habitable planets because its not just enough to have a planet in the habitable zone, you have to have chemicals that are consistent with life and a history thats consistent with the development of life, the better we can understand planet formation, the better we are able to predict which planets might be habitable.

The lack of such planets in our own solar system is more likely to be due to random chance or an accident.

We've made a great effort to put together a sale that we thought was suitable for this particular market which is strong for the right things, it seems to have paid off.

There were a few stones that were disappointing but overall the s... by David Bennett

There were a few stones that were disappointing but overall the sale was a huge success.

It's worthwhile for people to come and look at it because you probably won't be seeing it again in two or three year's time, it may very well be cut up into all these wonderful famous stones.

It really just soared off the scale of rare into something just,... by David Bennett

It really just soared off the scale of rare into something just, one off, it's just unique.

We're estimating between $28-38 million, there have been a couple ... of stones that have sold for around $2 million per carat or a little more historically so it seems to be perfectly correctly estimated ... We will see.

The Gemological Institute of America, the highest body for grading diamonds, have given this stone their highest possible grading, which is vivid pink, it's so strong the color. That makes it a very rare stone indeed, in fact it's the largest pear-shaped fancy vivid pink diamond ever to be offered at auction.

Very few gemstones have ever been sold for more than that, and it's setting the record price here in Asia for a gemstone in auction.

For me the Blue Moon was always the blue diamond of my career. I've never seen a more beautiful stone - its shape, colour and purity. It's a magical stone.

Overall, it was an extraordinary evening. by David Bennett

Overall, it was an extraordinary evening.

The market for vivid blue diamonds of this level, it's so rare. Each stone is individual, in a sense, the GIA (Gemological Institute of America) graded 400 blue diamonds and only four of the 400 were graded (fancy) vivid blue. So even amongst this extremely rare class of blue diamonds, to get one vivid blue, 12 carats, internally flawless, is once in a blue moon.

You're looking at something that, by a freak of nature, has been brought up by a volcano. It's just so extraordinary that this diamond would have stayed forever, miles under the earth's surface...It's like the most secret part of the earth has just been shown to us.

Natural pearls made huge prices, all soaring multiple times beyon... by David Bennett

Natural pearls made huge prices, all soaring multiple times beyond pre-sale estimates.

A new record price for a ruby, in over 40 years, I cannot recall ever having seen another Burmese ruby of this exceptional size possessing such outstanding colour.

Nobody believed that you could turn this thing around and make it vibrant again because there were so many things that needed to fall together to make that happen, we kind of had to do a dance to choreograph this all to make it work.

We've kind of got this momentum now where we've shown we can live up to what we said we were going to do.