CaratMinus 0.1% for color: pinks rise, blues and yellows slip
The Fancy Color Research Foundation's second-quarter index moved one tenth of one percent. Pink gained 0.1%, blue lost 0.4%, yellow lost 0.3%. The widest single move in the set was a 1.3% fall in 2-carat blues.
§1A quarter in which nothing happened.
The most illiquid corner of the diamond trade has just reported a quarter in which almost nothing happened, and that is the finding. The Fancy Color Research Foundation's index of pink, blue and yellow diamonds moved 0.1% lower across the second quarter of 2026. Pink rose 0.1%, blue fell 0.4%, yellow fell 0.3%, and the index moved one tenth of one percent. The foundation described a market that remained broadly stable. Against a natural colourless market that spent thirteen months falling and a lab-grown market that has lost most of its wholesale value since 2018, a flat quarter in colour is a competitive result rather than a dull one.
Pink is the only one of the three that turned, and it turned by size rather than by intensity. One and 1.5-carat pinks each added 0.4% while 2 and 3-carat pinks added 0.6%, which is the opposite of the pattern in colourless goods, where the small sizes have led every recent turn. On intensity, fancy-vivid pinks gained 0.5% and fancy-intense pinks lost 0.1%. The previous quarter had pink down 0.3%, so this is a reversal rather than a continuation, and it is the largest category in the index by traded value.
§2Blue is where the dispersion sits.
Blue is where the dispersion sits. The blue index fell 0.4% on a spread that runs from 1-carat stones up 0.7% to 2-carat stones down 1.3%, with 3-carat down 0.7% and 5-carat flat. Inside that, 1-carat fancy-vivid blues gained 1.5% while fancy and fancy-intense blues each lost 0.6%. A 2.8 point gap between the best and worst blue sub-categories in a single quarter, in a market where a handful of stones can constitute a quarter's evidence, is the honest measure of how thin this tape is. Yellow was the quietest of the three, down 0.3% for a second consecutive quarter, with 3-carat yellows up 0.7% against fancy-intense yellows down 1.3%.
Pink rose 0.1%, blue fell 0.4%, yellow fell 0.3%, and the index moved one tenth of one percent.
§3Category against category.
For the counter, the useful comparison is not quarter on quarter but category against category. Coloured stones proper have been running at two speeds since the spring, with a 6.59-carat Kashmir sapphire clearing $906,250 at Heritage in May while members of the International Colored Gemstone Association reported demand roughly 30% below 2022. Fancy colour diamonds have done neither. They have not printed a trophy result this quarter and they have not repriced downward. The index has been embedded in cutting-and-planning software since July, which means a cutter can now see the same number the trader sees before the wheel touches the rough.
Stability at this level is a statement about liquidity, not about value. An index that moves a tenth of a percent across three months is describing a market where very little changed hands, and the sub-category spreads confirm it, because 1-carat fancy-vivid blues up 1.5% alongside 2-carat blues down 1.3% is not a trend, it is a sample size. Read the direction, ignore the decimal, and price the individual stone. Fancy colour has always been a market of specific goods rather than of averages, and this quarter it did the trade the courtesy of not pretending otherwise.
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