I dug up the pics of mine - if you look at the inner fold of the clip you can see that the (protected) area is simialr to dark grey phosphate, a mildly rough finish, defintely not blued or shiny in any way. I haven't cleaned it, it's still the same finish as when I took it off the Z in 1980, stored since. I can't speak for all of the clips out there, just my personal sample (and observation), so it's not a large sample size to correlate. Maybe more than one vendor ? Can't say -