The invention relates to a device and to a method for validating whether an object is an element (5) of the human body, comprising at least the following steps: illuminating with at least one first light source (1) and with at least one second light source (2) an object that it is desired to validate is or is not a human body element; acquiring an image with an image sensor (3), the pixels of said image being associated with at least two characteristic values of a first color component and of a second color component, respectively; implementing validating processing dependant on comparisons between the values of the second component of the pixels in a zone of interest of the image and values of the first component of said pixels; validating or not the authenticity of the object (5) depending on the result of the validating processing.