JORDAN FINE DIAMONDS: ARGYLE PINK DIAMOND MINE

Pink diamonds are very rare, representing only 1/10th of one percent of all the diamonds that come out of the ground. Pinks can go for $25,000 to $40,000 wholesale. In comparison, brown diamonds may cost a few thousand dollars per carat. "That's the kind of pricing that pinks can fetch," says Jordan Fine, one of the world's foremost experts on natural color diamonds, and president of JFINE, a boutique firm specializing in these precious stones. "It's almost unheard of in the industry."

Pink diamonds command huge premiums at auction, including the "Pink Star" diamond that famously fetched over $70 million this year.

JFINE's accessibly priced pink diamonds

Now, JFINE has made the highest quality pink diamonds available at accessible price points. "Not everybody can spend $10 or $20 million on a stone, so in this collection we have pieces that start at $1,500 retail," says Fine. "We really wanted to make pink diamonds something that everybody could afford and make a part of their lives."

J. Lo's color diamonds

Consumers have become more aware of colored stones, in part because of celebrities like Jennifer Lopez, who received 6-carat pink diamond during her ill-fated engagement to Ben Affleck. JLo mended her broken heart later with a spectacular 14-carat blue diamond from former husband Marc Anthony.

London Jewelers

The JFINE line is sold at a few select retailers around the country, including, in the New York region, London Jewelers Tappers Diamonds & Fine Jewelry, Barmakian Jewelers and Bitteridge "Now that we're putting jewelry out there with these pink diamonds in them, a lot more people are adopting it for bridal, for special gifts, for anniversaries," Fine says.

Responsibly mined in Australia

JFINE'S color diamonds are not only beautiful and rare, they are also conflict-free, from Australia's Argyle Diamond Mine, which produces 90% of the world's pink diamonds. As an authorized Argyle partner, one of only a handful in the world, JFINE obtains its stones directly from them. "Provenance and social responsibility has been on consumers' minds a lot, and the mine that we work with founded the Responsible Jewelry Council, and they're in Australia, which means there's not any conflict there," Fine explains.

Certified Arglye diamonds

Each Argyle diamond over 0.8 percent of a carat comes with a certificate from the mine affirming its authenticity. Diamonds from Argyle are old. "You won't find any fossils in the ore that they use to extract the diamonds," Fine says. "The diamonds are over a billion years old. That's before life existed." Over the years, he has acquired a number of notable pink diamonds from this mine, including the 2.37ct Dauphine, the largest red diamond known to originate from one of their exclusive tender sales.

Natural Color Diamond Association

Fine has been an active board member of the Natural Color Diamond Association since 2006, and has served as president.

He became a leading expert in the field by chance when, in 2000, he designed a web site for his wife's father, an emerald dealer who had begun carrying color diamonds. Fine put up the site promoting the fancy color diamonds, and had the calls transferred to his office in Boston.

"We just sat back and waited to see if anybody called, and the phone started ringing, and it got to the point where I realized that that could be more exciting for me than whatever I had been working on at the time."

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