Maple starts out quite whitish with a very nice warm tan tone. Over time exposure to the elements will slightly darken the original colour.
I also see that the standard finish is a polyurethane with tung oil as an option. With the poly the wood will start and stay quite white. And to me it tends to be lifeless. On the other hand the tung oil will give the wonderful warm wood tone that maple can provide. It also tends to make any figuring in the grain as described below pop and look 3 dimensional.
If you don't want to pay for the tung oil finish then perhaps buy the scales in the raw and finish them with tung oil yourself. And that way you can clean and refinish the wood periodically.
On it's own maple is rather boring. It really doesn't have a lot of character to the grain. But that changes dramatically if it's burl, birdseye or curly stock. In those cases the rich patterning of the odd grain really makes this otherwise boring wood pop like the dickens.
I see examples of both on their website for maple grips
My own feeling from working with wood over years as a hobby is that grips from plain maple would not be my first choice. Oh sure, the colour has a nice light warm look. But the wood is simply too plain. But as suggested above if you can get scales from them that use one of the highly figured examples then the new grips would be amazing.
For my own part I think they would look better on a blued gun due to the contrast between the lighter wood and the dark metal. On a stainless gun my own tastes lean towards a darker wood with nice grain again due to the contrast.
But hey, it's your gun. But to maximise the look pay the little extra needed to get the fancier grades of grain if it's an option and go with the tung oil finish either applied by yourself onto unfinished scales or by the makers.
