10 Most Expensive Rubies on Earth — #1 Can’t Be Bought.

In June 2023, a ruby sold for $34.8 million. It broke the world auction record, and it didn't even come from the country famous for the world's finest rubies. But here's the strange part. That record-breaking ruby isn't number one on this list. One ruby sold for nearly a million dollars per carat. Another was bought twice by the same famous jeweler, eight years apart. And one extraordinary ruby has no asking price at all. It belongs to a museum. No auction, no dealer waiting for an offer, so what could make a ruby matter more than a $34 million sale? Let's start with a ruby once owned by Indian royalty. Number 10. The Queen of Burma. In November 1937, a remarkable customer bought a ruby ring at Cartier in London. He was His Highness Kangarji III, the Maharau of Kutch. Ruler of a princely state in Western India. He sat on that throne for an astonishing 67 years. The ring held an oval ruby weighing about 23.66 carats. Cartier set it in platinum in a clean, bold art deco style made for a man's hand, with small diamond bars tucked onto the claws. Today it's known as the Queen of Burma. Burma is the old name for Myanmar, the country whose rubies have been the gold standard for centuries. Most of the finest come from one small region called the Mogok Valley. Remember that name? It's going to come up again. In November 2014, Christie's offered the ring in Geneva. Before the sale, two of the world's leading gem labs, SEF and Gubalin, examined the ruby. Both confirmed it was Burmese, and both reported something top buyers care about enormously—no indications of heating. Here's why that matters. Most rubies sold today have been heated. It's a normal, widely accepted treatment that improves color and clarity, and as long as it's disclosed, there's nothing dishonest about it. A heated ruby is still a real ruby, but a large ruby that's beautiful exactly as nature made it is far rarer, and the very top of the market pays heavily for that. Then there's the paperwork. The ring came with a copy of a letter from Cartier recording the exact date of the 1937 purchase, November 6th, and the royal buyer. A gem with history like that isn't just a stone, it's a story you can prove. The hammer came down at about $6 million, and yet, when the Queen of Burma sold, It wasn't even the most expensive Ruby Christies had sold in Geneva. Two years earlier, a bigger Ruby had brought more in that same city, and that money went somewhere very different. Number 9. The Hope Ruby On May 14th, 2012, Christie's Geneva held an auction called Jewels for Hope. Every piece came from the collection of Lily Safra, a philanthropist and one of the most serious jewelry collectors of her generation, and the proceeds were going to charity. The top lot was a ring by the Paris jeweler Chaumet. At its center sat a cushion-shaped Burmese ruby, weighing 32.08 carats. That's more than 8 carats heavier than the Queen of Burma. Before Safra, the ruby had belonged to Luz Mila Patiño, the Countess du Bois-Rouvray, another legendary collector. So this stone had already passed through some remarkable hands. Christie's estimated it at $3 to $5 million. Bidding went well past that. The ring sold for $6,742,440, a new world record for any ruby sold at auction. After the sale, it was renamed the Hope Ruby after the auction that made it famous. No relation, by the way, to the Hope Diamond. That one comes back into our story at the very end. The whole evening raised close to 38 million dollars. The original plan was to support 20 charities. Because the sale did so well, 12 more organizations were added. Bringing the total to 32. That raises a fair question. Did buyers pay more because the money was going to a good cause? Charity sales can create a generous mood in the room. But a world record is still a world record. Someone looked at that ruby and decided it was worth nearly $7 million. Here's the twist, though. The Hope ruby's record didn't last long. Within two years, it had been broken. And by the end of 2014, the record belonged to a ruby that weighed barely a quarter as much. Number 8. The graph ruby size isn't everything. The graph ruby proves it. It weighs 8.62 carats, roughly a quarter the size of the hope ruby. Yet in November 2014, it sold for about 8.6 million dollars, nearly 2 million more. At that moment, it was the most expensive ruby ever sold at auction. To understand how a much smaller stone can cost much more, you need one simple idea. Price per carat. Take the total price and divide it by the weight. That tells you how much a buyer paid for each carat. The Hope ruby sold for around $210,000 per carat. The Graph ruby, about $997,000 per carat. That's almost five times as much, carat for carat. Why? Because with rubies, quality matters far more than size. A smaller ruby with exceptional color and clarity can be worth much more than a big one that's merely very good. And the Graff ruby has the kind of deep, glowing red that dealers remember for years. But the most surprising part of this story is who bought it. The ruby is named after Lawrence Graff, the London jeweler famous for handling some of the world's most important gems. Back in 2006, Graff bought this same ruby at a Christie's auction in St. Moritz, reportedly for about $3.6 million. Later, the stone left his hands. Eight years after that first purchase, it came back up for sale at Sotheby's in Geneva, this time from the collection of a Greek financier named Dimitri Mavromatis. And Lawrence Graff bought it back, for more than twice what he'd paid the first time. The timing adds one more detail. Sotheby's sold the Graff ruby on November 12, 2014. The Queen of Burma had sold across town at Christie's just one day earlier. Two famous rubies, two rival auction houses, one city, two... Two days, and the far smaller stone brought far more. Graff came within a whisker of one million dollars per carat. Two years later, a ruby carrying an ancient royal title cleared that line. Number 7. The Ratna Raj. In Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, one word for ruby is Ratna Raj. It means, King of Precious Stones. In November 2016, Christie's Hong Kong gave that name to a single 10.05 carat ruby, which tells you how highly they rated it. The stone came from Fidee, a family jewelry house that has dealt in gems for four generations, and describes itself as dealing exclusively in Burmese rubies. Only a few of its treasured stones reached the open market. The Ratnaraj was one of them, set in a ring with a radiating surround of oval diamonds. The ruby came from the Mogok Valley, the same region behind the Queen of Burma. Christie's described the Ratnaraj's color as, pigeon's blood. You'll hear that phrase a lot in the ruby world, so let's be clear about it. It's a trade term for the most prized ruby red, intense and fully saturated. Without dull or brownish tones. It isn't proof of where a ruby came from, and different labs apply it a little differently. But when it shows up on a report for a 10-carat stone, serious buyers pay attention. Christie's estimated the ring at $8.8 to $12.5 million. The Rat Neurage sold for about $10.2 million, just over $1 million per carat. At the time, That was the third highest price per carat ever paid for a ruby at auction. If bidding had pushed toward the top of the estimate, the Ratnerage could have challenged the per carat world record itself. We'll meet the ruby that held that record shortly. That's what one great ruby can do. Now imagine trying to find 48 top-quality rubies, and making them all look like they belong together. Number 6. The Etcetera Ruby Necklace Finding one exceptional ruby is hard. Finding 48 that matches something else entirely. In June 2015, Christie's Hong Kong offered a ruby and diamond necklace made by Etcetera, the jewelry workshop of designer Edmund Chin. It held 48 Burmese rubies with a combined weight of about 120 carats. That's 120 carats in total, not one giant stone. On average, each ruby weighs around two and a half carats. Here's the challenge. No two rubies are exactly alike. One might lean slightly pink, another slightly purple, another a shade darker. On their own, you'd never notice. But line them up side by side around a neck, and any stone that's even a little off stands out immediately. So a necklace like this can't be rushed. Building a matched set at this level can take years of searching, comparing, and rejecting stones that are beautiful but not quite right. And the standard here was extreme. The Swiss lab SEF reported that all 48 rubies were Burmese, with no indications of heating. Christie's noted that the rubies showed highly matching vivid color and outstanding purity, a combination it called rarely encountered in Burmese rubies. On sale day, the bidding went on by phone for about 10 tense minutes. When it ended, the necklace had sold for $13,006,656. That set a world auction record for a ruby necklace. It was also the top lot of a sale that became, at the time, the most valuable jewelry auction ever held in Asia. Think about what that means. Individually, these are small rubies compared with the Ratnerage. Yet together, matched with this kind of precision, they were worth about 3 million dollars more. The Etcetera necklace showed what buyers will pay for many stones that match perfectly. The next jewel went back to the opposite idea. One ruby, alone in the spotlight. 5. The Jubilee Ruby In April 2016, Christie's in New York offered what it called the most important Burmese ruby to appear at auction in the United States in more than 25 years. The last comparable stone had sold back in 1990. It was called the Jubilee Ruby, an oval stone weighing 15.99 carats, set in a gold and diamond ring by Verdura, the American jewelry house known for bold, colorful designs. The name fit the moment. That year, Christie's was celebrating its 250th anniversary. So what makes a top ruby like this look so alive? To answer that, we need a quick lesson in why rubies are red in the first place. A ruby is a form of a mineral called corundum. Pure corundum is colorless. What turns it red is a tiny amount of an element called chromium. And Chromium does something else, too. It can make a ruby fluoresce, meaning the stone gives off a red glow of its own when it's hit by certain kinds of light, including the ultraviolet light in daylight. That glow is part of why the finest rubies can look as if they're lit from within. Not every ruby fluoresces strongly. Iron inside a stone, for example, can dampen the effect, and rubies from the same country don't all behave the same way. But a top-quality stone with strong fluorescence can look almost electric in the right light. Christie's estimated the Jubilee Ruby at $12 to $15 million. It sold for $14,165,000 to a private European buyer. That made it the most expensive colored gemstone ever sold at auction in the United States at the time. Not just the most expensive ruby. The most expensive colored gem of any kind. $14 million for a stone just under 16 carats is an extraordinary number. But four months earlier, in Hong Kong, a ruby about one carat smaller had sold for more than 18 million. Number 4. The Crimson Flame. Here's a number that stopped the jewelry world. $1,221,604. That's not the price of the ruby. That's the price of each carat. On December 1, 2015, Christie's Hong Kong sold a cushion-shaped Burmese ruby ring called the Crimson Flame. The ruby weighed 15.04 carats, came from Mogok, and was certified unheated. Christie's jewelry director in Asia, Vicky Sek, said it defined the perfect ruby in every way. Size, cut, color, quality, and origin. The final price was $18,372,919, about $2.5 million above the high estimate. The buyer was a private collector from Asia, and the Crimson Flame set a new world record for the highest price per carat ever paid for a ruby at auction. But here's the catch. It did not set the record for total price. Ruby records come in two kinds. The total price record goes to whoever pays the most for a single stone. The per-carat record goes to the stone that commands the most for every carat, which says more about quality than size. The Crimson Flame won on quality, and it took the per-carat crown from a Ruby that had set it just seven months earlier, the same Ruby that still held the total price record. Remember the graph Ruby? At just under a million dollars per carat, in barely a year, the market had leapt more than 20% past it. That's why Christie's called 2015 the Year of the Ruby. In June, the Etc. Necklace. In December, the Crimson Flame. But neither was the biggest ruby story of 2015. That had happened back in May, in Geneva, and it involved a price nobody had ever seen before. Number 3. The Sunrise Ruby May 12, 2015. Sotheby's, Geneva. A Cartier ring holding a 2559-carat Burmese ruby comes up for sale. Its name is the Sunrise Ruby. Like the Crimson Flame, it was certified Burmese, unheated, and pigeon's blood red. What set it apart was size. It was more than 10 carats bigger. Now remember where the record stood at this point. The most anyone had ever paid for a ruby at auction was about $8.6 million. For the graph ruby, just six months earlier, Sotheby's estimated the sunrise ruby at roughly $12 to $18 million. Even the low end would have broken the record. Bidding opened at 11 million Swiss francs. It didn't stop at the estimate. It didn't stop near it. The final price was 28.25 million Swiss francs, about $30.3 million. The new record was more than three times the old one. The Sunrise Ruby set three world auction records that day. The highest price for any ruby, the highest price per carat for any ruby, and the highest price for any jewel by Cartier. It also helped push that Sotheby's sale to about $160.9 million. time the highest total ever for a jewelry auction. Think about the leap. In 2012, the Hope Ruby set the record at under seven million dollars. Three years later, the Sunrise Ruby sold for more than four times as much. Why such a jump? Partly, it was the stone itself. Rubies this large and this fine almost never come to market. Partly, it was timing. Collectors around the world were competing hard for the finest colored gemstones, and when a few very wealthy bidders all want the same object, Prices can move in ways no estimate predicts. For the next eight years, $30 million was the number every great ruby was measured against. And then the record fell to a ruby that didn't come from Myanmar at all. Number 2. Estrella de Fura, $34.8 million On June 8th, 2023. At Sotheby's in New York, a ruby called the Estrella de Fura became the most expensive ruby ever sold at auction. At 55.22 carats, it was also the stone Sotheby's build as the largest ruby ever to come to auction. But the most surprising thing about it is where it came from. Not Myanmar, Mozambique. For centuries, the very top of the ruby market had belonged to Burma. Mozambique is a much newer name in the ruby world. The country's north, around a district called Montepuez, has become one of the world's major sources of rubies. Still, many collectors saw Mozambican stones as excellent, but not quite in the same league as the legendary Burmese gems. In July 2022, a rough ruby, weighing 101 carats, was unearthed at a mine in Montepuez, operated by a company called Fura Gems. It was described as the largest gem-quality ruby ever discovered. Then came the delicate part. Cutting a rough stone always means losing material, and every decision trades weight against color and brilliance. After careful planning, the 101-carat rough was cut and polished into a 55.22-carat cushion-shaped gem, keeping just over half of its original weight. The name means Star of Fura in Portuguese, Mozambique's official language. Before the sale. Sotheby's sent the ruby on a world tour, with stops including Hong Kong, Singapore, Geneva, and Dubai. The pre-sale estimate was more than $30 million. The final price was $34.8 million, beating the Sunrise Rubies record from 2015. In a strange coincidence, a rare pink diamond called the Eternal Pink sold at that same auction for exactly the same amount. Here's the detail that ties this countdown together. Per carat. The Estrella de Fura sold for about $630,000. That's roughly half the Crimson Flames per carat record, so it holds the total price crown, but not the per carat crown. Both records matter, they simply measure different things. There's also a story beyond the sale. Fura committed part of the proceeds to setting up an academy in Mozambique, offering technical training in fields like mining, engineering, carpentry and agriculture. $34.8 million is the highest confirmed price in this entire countdown. So what could possibly rank above it? A ruby that never went to auction at all. A ruby its owner gave away. Number 1. The Rosser Reeves Star Ruby No. 1 isn't for sale. It belongs to the Smithsonian Institution and is part of the Gem Collection at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., the same museum that holds the Hope Diamond. It's called the Rosser Reeves Star Ruby. It weighs 138.7 carats. More than twice the weight of the Estrella de Fura, and it came from Sri Lanka. At first glance, it looks nothing like the other rubies on this list. It isn't cut with sharp, sparkling facets. Instead, it's a cabochon, smooth and domed, like a polished red pebble. And when light hits that dome, a six-rayed star appears to glide across the surface. That effect is called asterism. Here's how it works. Inside the ruby are incredibly fine, needle-like crystals of a mineral called rutile. They line up in three directions, following the ruby's internal structure. Each set of needles reflects light into a bright line, the way a spool of silk thread catches light in a single shining band. Three lines crossing at the center make a six-pointed star. The Smithsonian describes it as one of the world's largest and finest star rubies, with superb color and a well-defined star. Now, the man behind the name, Rosser Reeves, was one of the most influential advertising executives in American history. In 1952, he helped create television ads for Dwight Eisenhower's presidential campaign, an early landmark in political TV advertising. Reeves adored this ruby. He carried it as a lucky stone, and he called it his baby. It wasn't locked in a vault. It went where he went. Then, in 1965, Reeves made a remarkable choice. He could have kept his lucky stone for the rest of his life, or sold it, or passed it down privately. Instead, he and his wife gave it to the Smithsonian. To this day, the museum credits the ruby as a gift of Mr. and Mrs. Rosser Reeves. A stone that once lived in one man's pocket became something the whole public could share. So, what is it worth? We couldn't find a verified current valuation. Or a recent auction sale of a comparable star ruby to measure it against. It belongs to the Smithsonian, where its importance is measured by more than a sale price. You might call it priceless, not as a dollar figure, but because it isn't on the market. And that's what makes it the right finale. The other nine rubies on this list sold at auction for a combined total of more than $140 million. The Estrella de Fura alone brought $34.8 million from a private buyer. Rosser Reeves chose a different path. He gave his lucky stone to a public museum so that anyone who walks through its doors can see it. The price of a ruby, and the one that has none. So what really makes a ruby valuable? Size helps, but the graph ruby proved a small stone can beat a big one. Color matters, and so does whether a ruby has ever been heated. Origin matters, until a ruby from Mozambique breaks a record Burmese stones had held for years. History matters too, from a Maharaja's Cartier ring, to a sale for charity. In the end, A ruby is worth whatever someone is willing to pay, unless, like Rosser Reeves, its owner decides some things shouldn't be for sale. So if you owned a ruby like this, would you sell it for millions, or give it to a museum for everyone to see? Tell me in the comments.