NAUJAAT/REPULSE BAY
North Arrow Minerals hasn't finished processing all of their bulk sample but they certainly have some fancy results so far.

A crew of collects a small bulk sample from a kimberlite deposit on the Qilalugaq property near Repulse Bay in 2007. Canadian mineral exploration company North Arrow Minerals recently released partial results of a 1,500 tonne deposit that is part of a $3.7 million resource definition development project. - photo courtesy of Nick Thomas, North Arrow Minerals Inc.

The company announced a significant proportion of the 5,366 diamonds greater than one millimetre found in its Q1-4 kimberlite from the Qilalugaq project so far have been yellow diamonds.

"We set 8.5 per cent just by stone count, but by carat weight it was over 21 per cent," North Arrow's president, CEO and director Ken Armstrong told Nunavut News/North. "That's still very preliminary and that doesn't mean that's the final number but in our minds, makes it very clear the yellow diamonds are part of the population."

In fact, they were also the largest three diamonds recovered from the Qilalugaq bulk sample to date: a 4.42 carat greenish yellow stone, a 4.16 carat intense yellow stone and a 3.53 carat pale yellow stone.

Even though the company has processed only about half the 1,500 tonne sample, Armstrong says North Arrow didn't go out specifically to find the speciality gems. "It's very unusual enough that they make up part of the resource of the mine plan," he said. "They are usually a fortuitous event."

Coloured diamonds are a rare classification of the gem with three main colours: pink and red, blue and then yellow which are the most common in the niche category.

Armstrong said the limited number of coloured diamonds meant that for a long time they were only the purview of the "uber-rich" of the world. However, in 2010, luxury jewellery company Tiffany's sparked greater interest after releasing some of their stockpiled inventory. "They launched this (yellow) collection to try and market them as being highly desirable for what might be called, for lack of a better term, 'the regular rich,'" he said.

The North Arrow president said some of the yellow diamonds found so far from the 609 tonnes processed from the Qilalugaq project have the saturation, tone and hue that master diamond cutters require to qualify for the "fancy" category.

Typically having a yellowish hue in a diamond is a negative, with X, Y, Z colour grades on the D to Z scale being quite yellow and classified as undesirable. However, as soon as that saturation level exceeds Z, the stones become fancy diamonds and are graded on a different scale.

"It's a pretty subjective thing," Armstrong explained, adding the possibility of North Arrow's find garnering a premium valuation. "We're certainly looking forward to getting the rest of this thing processed."

Originally a BHP Diamonds project, Qilalugaq was optioned by North Arrow from Stornoway Diamond Corporation to collect bulk and spoke samples after a series of kimberlites were found in that area of Nunavut in early the 2000s.

The Qilalugaq project is located on Melville Peninsula, Nunavut, nine km north of Naujaat (Repulse Bay). The approximately 1,500-tonne sample (field weight) was collected in July and August 2014 from the Q1-4 kimberlite, the biggest kimberlite in the Qilalugaq project, the highest grade body and the one that's closest to Naujaat.

Processing and sorting of the remainder of the bulk sample is expected to finish in mid-April.

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