The Nur-Ul-Ain

The oval brilliant-cut, 60 carat, pale pink Nur-Ul-Ain diamond is the centerpiece of a tiara designed by Harry Winston for the wedding of the Empress Farah to the last Shah of Iran in 1958. The name means the ‘Light of the Eye.’ It was plundered from the Mogul Emperor of India by the Persians in 1739.  The diamond is set in platinum, and is surrounded by pink, yellow, and colorless diamonds with a row of colorless baguette diamonds in tapering sizes lining the base of the tiara. The tiara contains 324 diamonds in total. It is believed the stone emanates from India.

The Nur-ul-Ain and the Darya-i-Nur are believed to have been cut from the same rare, pale pink, enormous, 400-carat diamond, referred to as "Diamanta Grande Table" (the Great Table Diamond), by Jean Baptiste Tavernier, the 17th century French traveler and jeweler, who had seen it at Golconda in South India in 1642. This seems to be confirmed by a team of Canadian experts from the Royal Ontario Museum, who conducted research on the Iranian Imperial Jewels in 1965. They asserted that the Darya-i-Nur is the major portion of the Great Table Diamond seen by Tavernier in 1642. The other piece of the Great Table diamond is thought to have been re-cut, to yield the stone known as the Nur-ul-Ain