Damien Hirst's Diamond-Encrusted Skull Cost £14 Million to Make and Sold for £50 Million in 2007

In June 2007, the White Cube gallery in London unveiled a small object on a plinth in a darkened room. It was a life-sized human skull, cast in platinum, completely covered in diamonds. The original teeth had been preserved and reinserted into the platinum jaw. Set into the forehead was a single 52-carat pink diamond. The piece was titled For the Love of God — what the artist's mother reportedly exclaimed when he told her what he was making — and it represented, as Hirst put it, "a celebration against death."

The numbers behind the skull

The work contains 8,601 individual diamonds, all of them flawless, totaling 1,106.18 carats. The original 18th-century human skull on which the platinum cast was based had been purchased from a London taxidermy shop for an undisclosed sum. The diamonds came primarily from sources certified to comply with the Kimberley Process, the international scheme for preventing conflict-diamond trade.

The cost of materials alone, according to Hirst's studio, was £14 million (about $28 million in 2007 dollars). The piece took the diamond-setters at the London jeweler Bentley & Skinner over two years to assemble. When complete, it weighed 1.106 kilograms.

The £50 million sale that wasn\'t quite a sale

White Cube announced on August 30, 2007 that the skull had sold for £50 million ($100 million) to an "anonymous investment group." It later emerged that the group included Hirst himself, his dealer Jay Jopling, and two unnamed investors, who would jointly tour and exhibit the piece. The deal was structured to allow Hirst to retain partial ownership while reporting a record-breaking price — a transaction structure that drew sharp criticism from art-world commentators who pointed out that an artist buying his own work is closer to a marketing maneuver than a sale.

Whatever the accounting, the headline price was real, and it remains one of the highest valuations ever recorded for a work by a living artist. Adjusted for inflation, the £50 million figure is over £75 million today.

Memento mori, with receipts

For the Love of God sits in a long art-historical lineage of memento mori — works designed to remind viewers of their mortality. Medieval skulls were carved into church reliquaries; Hans Holbein hid an anamorphic skull in The Ambassadors in 1533; 17th-century Dutch still lifes piled skulls next to fading flowers and snuffed candles.

Hirst's contribution flips the convention. The traditional memento mori uses cheap, decaying materials to insist that wealth is fleeting. Hirst used the most expensive imaginable materials and the densest possible concentration of value — diamonds, platinum, a real skull — and made the resulting object permanent, blinding, and almost obscenely valuable. The message lands either way: you can sink unimaginable wealth into a skull, but it is still a skull.

The piece has been exhibited at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Pinault Collection in Venice, and the Tate Modern in London. As of 2024, it remains in the joint ownership of Hirst's group and continues to tour.