Beauty is locked in a battle with bling
But the hardest minerals on earth soften all who see them, says Chloe Fox The Ancient Greeks believed diamonds to be the tears of the gods. The Romans thought that they were the splinters of fallen stars. The Chelsea football team seem to think that they are a status symbol. They’re a girl’s best friend and a man’s worst enemy, unless of course he happens to be a rapper.
Perhaps it is because they seem to hail from such a grown-up world that diamonds make me feel like a child. Walking past the glass casements of the jewellers on Old Bond Street, I can’t help but press my nose against the glass of almost every one. Inside, gems on their velvet beds tantalise and taunt, whispering promises of late nights, laughter and Lear jets.
The hardest minerals on earth soften all who see them. As Zsa Zsa Gabor once sweetly said, ‘I never hated a man enough to give him his diamonds back.’ Ms Gabor should teeter down to Leviev next time she’s in town (although, at almost 90, her diamond days could be numbered). The recently opened Bond Street jewellery store boasts a better security system than the Bank of England. As well it might, with more than £100 million worth of exceptional diamonds — both clear and coloured nestling within its four walls. ‘Our first flagship store in London is in many ways the diamond capital of the world,’ explains the brilliantly named Lev Leviev.
An Israeli born in Russia, this 50-year-old entrepreneur (and father of nine children) is one of the world’s leading diamond suppliers. Having started out, aged 16, as an apprentice at an Israeli dia mond-polishing plant, Leviev now owns mines in Russia and Africa (as well as the odd TV channel and swaths of real estate). His diamond company is the only one in the world that is fully integrated — it does everything from owning the mines to cutting, polishing and designing the jewellery.
And it’s some jewellery. Leviev (the shop) looks surprisingly unimpressive from the outside, but from the minute you walk in and come face to face with not one, not two, but three towering security guards (legs hip-width apart, hands folded inexplicably over groin) you get the feeling you’re approaching greatness. Suede sofas, scented candles and dustypink roses may give a cosy impression, but the rocks themselves mean serious business. They are breathtakingly beautiful. Some are so big they narrowly avoid vulgarity. Fortunately for Richard Burton, there was no Leviev when he was dangling carats under Elizabeth Taylor’s nose. The Queen of Opulence would have steered him straight to Leviev’s pièce de résistance, the D-flawless (diamonds — like bra cups — get bigger and better) 110.38-carat Mir Jumlah diamond, the finest of its kind in existence. Either that, or the ‘Flower Ring’, whose ‘petals’ are eight flawless diamonds weighing more than nine carats and whose centre is a 1.73 fancy red diamond, one of the only four in the world. When I ask for prices I am told that they are only given out ‘on application’. This is information which a girl wandering about in last year’s flip-flops is obviously not going to be given.
Put it this way, you’re unlikely to come away from a shopping trip at Leviev with much change from half a million pounds. Actually, let’s face it, you’re unlikely to go there for a shopping trip at all, unless you happen to be a Russian oligarch or his wife. ‘Mainly Russians, Chinese and the bankers who have a lot of money to spend,’ whispers Leviev’s PR, wide-eyed with the thrill of it, when I ask her who in this town could possibly afford to buy a diamond worth more than a Mediterranean villa.
The only trouble is that somewhere along the line, wealth seems to have got into the wrong hands. Beauty is locked in a battle with bling. Victoria Beckham may be many things, but a New Age Ava Gardner isn’t one of them. The days when diamonds glimmered through the darkness of a box at the opera or caught the candlelight at a costume ball are the stuff of legend. Now, they are synonymous with spray tans, SUVs and the fixed grins of red-carpet awards ceremonies (mind you, not at the recent Baftas, a low-rent event with hardly even a borrowed diamond in sight). This, if nothing else, should provide comfort for those of us who are doomed to only ever peer through the glass, our breath steaming the dream. That, and the late publishing tycoon Malcolm S. Forbes’s wry observation that ‘Diamonds are nothing more than chunks of coal that stuck to their jobs.’
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