Diamond Ring Designed by Jony Ive & Marc Newson Created by Diamond Foundry Raises $461,250 for (RED) at Sotheby's Auction

Sir Jony Ive, Apple’s Chief Design Officer, and renowned industrial designer Marc Newson - having curated the (RED)'s Design and Innovation auction 2013 - designed a unique diamond ring, made exclusively for (RED) by Diamond Foundry® which was auctioned by Sotheby’s in Miami on December 5th as part of the third (RED) auction.

The (RED) Diamond Ring was sold at the (RED) Auction for $256,250. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation matched 90% of the bid for a total of $461,250 donated toward the fight against AIDS.

Consistent with their mutual obsession with transforming raw material into objects of value, Ive & Newson’s design is singular, clear and uncompromised by the traditional metal settings and bands that have previously been required to create ‘diamond rings’. Theirs will be created by removing material rather than adding - an ambition made possible by the extraordinary scale of the stone which will enable the ring to be completely made of diamond.

Creation:

The team at Diamond Foundry was faced with a new challenge: to create a block of diamond with the dimensions necessary and to be polished into a ring of this size. No base plate of the required dimensions existed, and no existing earth extracted diamond would be sufficiently pure enough to allow growing a rough diamond of this size.

To create this, it required coaxing the first ten atoms of a layer into believing that a certain rare metal is a diamond, these atoms would assemble into real diamond and allow the creation of diamond blocks of previously unprecedented size. This process was not previously considered possible. Through this process and Diamond Foundry’s plasma reactor technology, managed to create the first diamond blocks of the required size for this design project.

After this, the logistics of how to cut and polish a stone of this size needed to be established - a task that challenged Diamond Foundry’s Antwerp based master cutter who has polished some of the world’s largest diamonds. The shape and model of the finished stone are revolutionary since there were no guidelines, the cutters will have to create it from scratch and the custom tools had to be ordered from a specialized diamond tools supplier in Belgium.

The diamond block will be faceted with several thousand facets, some of which are as small as several hundred micrometers. The interior ring will be cylindrically cut out for the desired smoothness using a micrometer thick water jet inside which a laser beam is cast. The finished ring will have between  2000-3000  facets which have never been seen before on a single piece.

Covet:

Centered on the theme of light and the color red, the collection of contemporary art and design was auctioned by Sotheby’s during Art Basel Miami Beach and Design Miami/ on the evening of 5 December 2018 - including global bidding available live online at sothebys.com. The auction was preceded by a public exhibition presented by Gagosian at the famed Moore Building, which opened on World AIDS Day, December 1st.

In 2011, a Swiss jewelry company created the world’s first all-diamond ring using 150 carats of a pure diamond -- which took more than one year to create.

About (RED):

(RED) was founded in 2006 to engage businesses and people in the fight against AIDS. (RED) partners with the world’s most iconic brands that contribute proceeds from (RED)-branded goods and services to the Global Fund. (RED) Proud Partners include Amazon, Apple, Bank of America, Beats by Dr. Dre, Belvedere, Claro, The Coca-Cola Company, Durex, MCM, Salesforce, SAP, Starbucks, and Telcel. (RED) Special Edition partners include aden+anais, Alessi, ALEX AND ANI, Andaz, Baxter of California, Bombas, Calm, Fatboy USA, Girl Skateboards, Montblanc, Mophie, S’well, Wanderlust, and Vespa. To date, (RED) has generated more than $500 million for the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, to support HIV/AIDS grants in Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Rwanda, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania and Zambia. 100 percent of that money goes to work on the ground – no overhead is taken. Global Fund grants that (RED) supports have impacted nearly 110 million people with prevention, treatment, counseling, HIV testing and care services. For more information, visit  red.org

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