The method of identifying an effective pigment comprises: a first step of imaging a target effective pigment to obtain image data thereof; a second step of subjecting the obtained image data to background processing and extracting image data concerning a region containing one particle of the effective pigment as image data for processing; a third step of extracting image characteristic parameters from the image data for processing; and a fourth step of identifying the target effective pigment, based on the image characteristic parameters of the target effective pigment extracted in the third step, using a pre-prepared database that stores information on various kinds of effective pigments in such a manner as to correlate with the image characteristic parameters of various kinds of effective pigments extracted by conducting the second and third steps.