The invention discloses a method for identification of natural curcumin and synthetic curcumin. The method includes: firstly taking methanol as the solvent to prepare ar-turmerone series standard solutions of different concentrations, using a gas chromatography-tandom mass spectrometer to determine ar-turmerone so as to obtain a multi-reaction monitoring chromatogram, and adopting the ar-turmerone concentration as the abscissa, taking the peak area as the ordinate to draw a standard curve of the peak area and concentration, and using the obtained multi-reaction monitoring chromatogram and standard curve as the reference standard; and then employing the gas chromatography-tandom mass spectrometer to determine a to-be-determined substance by the same method, comparing the measurement result with the reference standard, conducting qualitative analysis according to the retention time of ar-turmerone and qualitative/quantitative ion abundance ratio, and performing quantitative analysis according to the peak area and standard curve of the to-be-determined substance. If the ratio of the ar-turmerone content to the total curcumin content in the to-be-determined substance is 0.5 per thousand or above, the to-be-determined substance is natural curcumin, otherwise the to-be-determined substance is synthetic curcumin. The method provided by the invention is fast, efficient and accurate.