Recent advances in anti-counterfeiting technology using fluorescent hybrid materials

Counterfeiting has rapidly evolved with advances in manufacturing and digital replication technologies, posing serious challenges across various sectors, including pharmaceuticals, electronics, textiles, finance, and food. Traditional anti-counterfeiting methods such as holograms, barcodes, and radio frequency identification tags have become increasingly vulnerable to high-resolution reproduction techniques, necessitating innovative solutions. Fluorescent materials have emerged as particularly promising candidates due to their tunable optical responses, hidden features under normal light, and highly complex, multi-layered security signals that are difficult to replicate. In this review, we comprehensively summarize recent progress in fluorescence-based anti-counterfeiting technologies, classifying them into three major categories: organic, inorganic, and nanomaterial systems. Organic materials, including aggregation-induced emission luminogens, spiropyrans, single-benzene-based fluorophores, polymers, hydrogels, and proteins, offer versatile molecular design, high responsiveness to external stimuli, and biocompatibility, making them suitable for on-dose pharmaceutical security. Inorganic systems, such as metal complexes, metal–organic frameworks, and crystalline materials, provide long lifetimes, excellent thermal and photochemical stability, and multiparameter readouts. Nanomaterials, including quantum dots, carbon dots, nanoparticles, and nanoclusters, leverage size-dependent emission, surface functionalization, and multimodal properties to enable advanced and dynamic security patterns. Beyond the materials themselves, integration with printing, coating, fiber embedding, smartphone-based readers, and artificial intelligence-assisted detection highlights the translational potential of these approaches for real-world deployment. Emerging directions, such as multimodal fluorescence, physically unclonable functions, edible and biocompatible tags, and environmentally sustainable systems, further expand the scope of application. Collectively, this review provides a forward-looking framework that not only summarizes the current state of the art but also outlines future strategies for developing programmable, robust, and user-friendly fluorescent anti-counterfeiting technologies.