Abstract. The reliability of a fingerprint recognition system would be seriously impacted if the fingerprint scanner can be spoofed by a fake finger. Therefore, fake finger detection is necessary. This work introduces a new approach to detect fake finger based on the property of color change exhibited by a real live finger when the finger touches a hard surface. The force exhibited when the finger presses the hard surface changes the blood perfusion which resulted in a whiter color appearance compared to a normal uncompressed region. A method to detect and quantify such color change is proposed and used to differentiate a real finger from the fakes. The proposed approach is privacy friendly, fast and does not require special action from the user or with prior training. The preliminary experimental results indicate that the proposed approach is promising in detecting the fake finger made using gelatin which is particularly hard to detect.