By Mimosa Spencer

PARIS (Reuters) – In a bid to drum up investor appetite for rough, natural diamonds, mining company Lucara Diamond Corp and manufacturer HB Antwerp on Monday unveiled a 1,175-carat diamond in New York City.

According to the companies, the stone is the biggest rough diamond ever shown in America and third largest to have been discovered. These claims could not be independently verified by Reuters.

HB Antwerp said to Reuters it had yet not decided if the uncut diamond would be made into polished stone.

It was the first of many viewings.

This uncut diamond was among three that were extracted in Botswana’s Karowe Mine over 1,000 carats in the recent past. They teamed up in 2020 with Louis Vuitton for the Sewelo Diamond, which was also extracted from the Karowe Mine. All three companies took control.

“We’ve been in the business for many years, for quite some time, and these types of things do get us excited because of the sheer size,” Oded Mansori, chief executive officer of HB Antwerp, told Reuters. For the sake of demonstrating its size, he raised his hands and curved his fingers to hold an egg.

They wanted to bring attention to the true nature of the gemstone at a moment when laboratory-grown diamonds can be viable alternatives to real ones.

In 2015, the mining company began using xray technology to identify and locate diamonds. “We do expect that we will recover more exceptional diamonds in excess of a thousand carats in size – but on a global basis, this is still an extremely rare and unusual event,” said Lucara’s chief executive, Eira Thomas.