Christie's latest offering might be the ultimate holiday gift.
Come December 5th, the auction house is set to host its Magnificent Jewels sale in New York and one notable inclusion in the lineup is the "Foxfire Diamonds"—pear-shaped diamond earrings cut from the largest known gem quality rough mined in North America.
From its subarctic Canadian birthplace, in the Diavik Mine, the 187.66-carat "Foxfire" diamond rough stone yielded all four diamonds making up the pair of earrings. It took almost an entire year to design, plan, saw, polish, and assemble the earrings from the rough stone and they're estimated to sell between $1million to $3million next week.
The name "Foxfire" is inspired by a legend of Northern Lights: a fabled story of a fox whose tail strikes a fresh drift of snow as it dashes across the tundra, casting a spray of otherworldly lights into the night sky. The mythical fox is said to have created fire in the night sky, aka, the aurora borealis.
And the highest bidder at the auction will get to fly to the aurora borealis hotspot for themselves. The winner will receive a complimentary trip for two individuals to visit Diavik, including prepaid round-trip business class tickets from anywhere in the United States or Canada to Yellowknife, Canada, a stay at The Explorer Hotel and a surface tour of the diamond mine.
When not touring the mine, the hotel boasts 1,544 successful aurora observation nights. Daytime activities for adventurous folk include dog sledding or kayaking the area's crystal rivers.
Canada is the world’s fourth-largest diamond producer, with most of that output coming from one area near Lac de Gras in the Northwest Territories. The discovery of kimberlite pipes there in the early 1990s led to the development of several major mines. Diamond-bearing kimberlite deposits that can be mined economically are noteworthy since only about 50 such occurrences have been found worldwide since the 1870s, mainly in Australia, Angola, Canada, Russia, and South Africa.
