The effectiveness and practicality of using simultaneous superglue & iodine fuming method for fingermark development on ‘low yield’ leather surfaces: A feasibility study

摘要

Highlights ? Simultaneous superglue & iodine fuming method is effective for fingermark enhancement on light-coloured leather substrates. ? Superglue fuming method is effective for freshly deposited fingermarks on dark-coloured leather substrates. ? The novel fuming chamber designed for simultaneous superglue & iodine fuming is found to be simple, fast and effective. Abstract This research successfully demonstrated the first use of simultaneous superglue & iodine fuming on leather surfaces compared to superglue, iodine, superglue–iodine and iodine–superglue fuming methods which typically give low fingermark yields. A novel fuming chamber was developed and used for simultaneous superglue & iodine fuming. Results show that the simultaneous fuming method produced significantly better enhancement for light-coloured leather substrates relative to other processing procedures, but was found to be ineffective on dark-coloured leather. However, superglue, as one of the most common methods in practice, was found to be effective for freshly deposited latent fingermarks on dark-coloured leather. The newly designed chamber for the simultaneous fuming method has proved to be fast, effective and delightfully easy to use.