At Wins yesterday signing over another large slice of my soul for GT6 parts and he had one Metalastik in stock so I nabbed it for the science.

Here's the only paint mark on it.

And the result is....

So as hoped for markedly different. It's pointless trying to describe how twistable these are in hand, until we build confidence in the coloured markings this test is the way to identify any you have in stock. Even if the marks did go on in the factory (which we have no way of proving) we have no way to know they used colours consistently, they may have simply used any two colours that came to hand to differentiate a days batches.
Here's both in daylight hopefully go give a better colour rendition.

To my eyes and those of Mrs Weevil the brown is just brown, no ish-ness about it. The other I see as pink and Mrs Weevil calls peach.
Wins had some pattern ones in stock that felt closer to the hard than the soft but he had no matched pairs.
NB: All results are provisional pending independent validation at test site B. Which may of course throw a spanner in the works if the paint marks
are reliable and red is a 3rd grade. The more people can repeat the test the bigger our sample size and the better chance we have of making sense of it.