Black is Back (American Express Centurion)

Again I am tardy in posts, but here's a real short one.

My renewed American Express Centurion card finally tracked me down across a few continents.

To my amusement the physical credit card is made of black titanium!

Although patently silly, the new card material does have one practical side effect: the card name and numbers are now human-readable. The previous plastic cards had black characters on black plastic making reading the information a chore. Now the numbers are pressed through the black anodized surface and show up a burnished titanium color.

An impractical consequence of titanium construction is that it appears that every customs office through which this package passed on its long journey to me found the xray signature sufficiently unexpected given the declaration of contents that they opened the package.

Membership has its, uh, excesses...

Update: here is a post I found regarding this, there is a photo of the packaging also. I also found out that certain other countries had received the titanium Centurion card earlier.

Update 2: I received my second Centurion card yesterday. Apparently they are upgrading the cards whether or not they are soon to expire. So this whole thing is a vanity upgrade (and probably an expensive one) for American Express.