Today, Messika unveils a spectacular new high jewelry creation with a massive blue diamond as its centerpiece. The jaw-dropping stone is the largest and rarest blue diamond ever to be uncovered in Botswana. It was discovered as a 41.11-carat rough in 2019 when it emerged from the Orapa mine. After cutting and polishing it revealed a Fancy Deep Blue VVS1 Type IIb 20.46-carat stone.
The government of Botswana, which still owns the gem, tapped Valérie Messika, founder of her namesake company, to design a jewelry piece to highlight the stone. The result? A pendant necklace set with more that 500 diamonds on the collar and surrouning the oval-cut Okavango Blue Diamond. “I tried to let the diamond speak by itself,” Messika told Robb Report. “I had so much respect of the beauty of the stones that I wanted it to be the central part…it reminds me something vintage with this medallion surrounded by white diamonds. I want the blue to pop, the more it’s surrounded by white, the blue is stronger.”
It’s no wonder the jeweler was Botwana’s top choice. Messika founded her eponymous company in 2005, drawing on the expertise of her father, André Messika—a renowned diamond dealer whose family has been in the diamond trade for generations and who has been known to supply some of the world’s best stones to the top houses. Following in her family’s footsteps, Valérie Messika has since made a name for herself on the Place Vendôme, Paris’ premiere destination for the best jewelry in the world. Her designs have catapulted her family’s name into the spotlight with popular designs like the Move collection, known for floating mobile diamonds in oval diamond-accented shapes. Collaborations with Kate Moss and Gigi Hadid further solidified the house the new must-have jewelry amongst younger, hipper clientele.
The jewelry piece and the stone, however, are not for sale. “This project is, for me, a tribute to natural diamonds,” she says. “It’s one of a kind and it’s a time in my career that I can work with such an amazing rare stone, so for me it’s, of course, a big honor to be the first, and for the moment, the only one to create a jewelry piece with the stone.” When asked why she would devote so much of her resources and time—it took a year to produce—to design a necklace never to be sold she says the thought never occurred to her. “Everybody focused on this stone for such a long time—all the craftsmanship, all the design people—but for me, I saw it also like a kind of tribute also to my expertise as a diamond jeweler.”
It’s not the first time she’s created a masterpiece around a rare African stone. Four years ago, she designed a jewelry piece around a cushion-shaped D-flawless 33-carat diamond from the Lucara mine in north-central Botswana. “I started the relationship with Botswana to promote the beauty of their land, creating natural diamonds, so for me it’s to be continued our relationship, and it’s important to put in light the magic of natural diamonds.” She adds that the piece is meant to celebrate the extraordinary creations from the earth, because as she puts it, “lab-born diamond are kind of like a photocopy from a laboratory.”
What is unprecedented is the diamond itself. “It’s the first time in my whole life [to see a diamond like this], and I’m not sure I will see a second…it’s very, very, very rare,” Messika emphasizes. “I think only 0.01% of the world’s diamonds can be blue.”
For now, the necklace remains a singular creation rather than an acquisition. In a luxury world obsessed with the next big thing, the Okavango Blue is a reminder that some treasures simply cannot be replicated—or bought.
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