THE Ring! (Photo courtesy| Shawish Jewellery)

Okay friends, take a deep breath and… Brace yourselves for the bauble to trump the mother of all baubles to-date.

Ooooh, close-up… (Photo courtesy| Shawish Jewellery)

Made by the Geneva-based luxury jeweller Shawish, it is being dubbed as “the world’s first all-diamond ring”. Y-es, a diamond ring made entirely out of a single chunk of cut-and-finished diamond (i.e. with no gold/platinum/silver band to be found as in regular rings).

View from the other side… (Photo courtesy| Shawish Jewellery)

It took a year for technicians to come up with the laser equipment that would allow carving right through the middle of the 150 brut carat diamond to form a perfect circle for the band but without altering the diamond’s molecular structure. And oh, they’ve got the copyright to this madness, which took a year as well to obtain. Unveiled at BaselWorld 2012, the annual watch and jewellery trade show, held a few weeks ago, this bling-bling is being valued at $68 million!

The sparkler in its full glory… (Photo courtesy| Shawish Jewellery)

It’s a beaut, really – an unadulterated, unaffordable and unattainable beaut. And my sketchy memory of A-Level Chemistry suggests it’s a whole lot impractical, too. Diamond, although the hardest substance on earth in its natural form, becomes brittle when cut, and I highly doubt this ring would be able to withstand the stress of daily wear-and-tear for long.

My pedantic queries aside, I’ve a niggling, innocent question, too: what size is the ring, and if it’s not the right one, can it be resized? The outlandishly amazing nature of the ring also begs this question: who do you think would be diva enough ‒ in Bollywood and beyond ‒ to don this dazzler? I think it has Naomi Campbell written all over it: she’s quite the diva and is dating a Russian billionaire, Vladislav Doronin, if you know what I mean? Over to you…