Abstract: Recently,it is more difficult to identify amber products in Chinese jewelry market.The amber and its familiar imitation samples are tested with the means of conventional gemmological methods,and FTIR and its technique of computer second derivative order for analysing the kinds and characteristics of carbon functional group in amber and searching for differences between the amber and its imitation samples.The results indicate that the absorption spectra of amber samples from different areas at 1 700 cm^-1are different.The difference between amber and natural resin is that the amber has characteristic absorption of aliphatic texture while natural resinc copal resin and anime have the weak absorption band at 3 080 cm^-1 caused by telescopic vibration of ν(CH) and the absorption band at 888 cm^-1 caused by bending vibration of γ(CH).There are great differences in 2 800~3 000 cm^-1 and 400~1 500 cm^-1 between the amber and synthetic resin samples.