Yep, "shiny black", as you say. That looks like a black ceramic bezel under harsh light. It's highly reflective gloss surface, so it only looks black when it's reflecting something dark - otherwise it's going to look various shades of grey.
BTW, you should sign up at ClickPix.org, upload your pics there and copy/paste the "BBcode full" embed codes in your post, so we can see the pics without clicking links.
Yep, "shiny black", as you say. That looks like a black ceramic bezel under harsh light. It's highly reflective gloss surface, so it only looks black when it's reflecting something dark - otherwise it's going to look various shades of grey.
No, the material colour is really, really unlikely to fade (given the composition of the material, I'm not sure it's even possible for the black to fade).
What you might have heard people complaining about is the silver coating of the markers on the insert fading. There have been reports of that. But if it happens, it's easily fixed by using a silver marker pen to re-colour the markers (the "Molotow mod" as it's know, after the brand of marker pen people use).