Where are yellow diamonds found?

Coloured diamonds are extremely rare. Just how rare may in fact surprise you. For every 10,000 colourless diamonds that are pulled out of the ground, just one coloured diamond will be excavated. That makes coloured diamonds a mere 0.0001% of all diamonds mined.

This tiny percentage is then further divided when we begin to talk about specific colours. While yellow diamonds are the most common colour after ‘white’ or colourless diamonds, in reality they make up a negligible amount of production.

Yellow diamonds have experienced somewhat of a resurgence in recent years, however. While ‘canary yellow’ diamonds have always been popular, lighter yellow stones have previously been thought of as dirty rather than beautiful. But thanks to a rebrand that has seen these stones renamed ‘champagne’ and ‘cognac’ rather than ‘light yellow’, their popularity has skyrocketed. Thus you’ll see far more yellow diamonds in Sydney today than you might have 20 years ago.

There are a few countries around the world that produce yellow diamonds. Perhaps the most famous are the African nations of Angola and Sierra Leone. Angola has been the world’s main provider of canary yellow diamonds for the last century, while Sierra Leone’s famous Zimmi mine produces the most valuable yellows on the market today. They are so vivid that they generally sell for 1.5x to 2x the price of any other yellow diamond.

Brazil, Borneo, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Central Africa are also known as yellow diamond producers, but these countries generally contribute lower grade stones when compared to Angola and Sierra Leone.

Because many of the nations who produce yellow diamonds are war torn and prone to corruption, it is vital that a yellow diamond buyer purchases stones only from reputable dealers who can guarantee that they have been ethically mined.