The useful clues are surprisingly simple. Learn what color, structure, trichomes and aroma can tell you—and what they absolutely cannot.
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Purple Haze · HansRoht · CC BY-SA 3.0Green is the baseline. Violet, blue, near-black and gold-green tones can be useful comparison clues, but color varies with genetics, temperature, nutrient status, harvest timing and storage.
White Widow · Lenny Montana · CC BY 2.0Trichomes are the tiny glandular structures that can make flower look sugary or silvered. Heavy coverage is visually distinctive, but a photograph cannot tell you the cannabinoid concentration of the product.
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Sour Diesel · Alapoet · CC BY 3.0Some cultivars commonly form looser, elongated flowers; others are compact and chunky. Structure is useful when the difference is obvious, but cultivation can reshape it dramatically.
Mountain Jam reference · yogi Bushby · CC BY 2.5Pistils can range from pale cream to orange, rust and brown as flowers mature. They help describe the sample, but their color overlaps across a huge number of cultivars.
Jack Herer · Forcefield21 · CC BY-SA 4.0Fuel, lemon, orange, pine, berry, grape, skunk, mint, garlic, coffee and dessert notes are much more useful when two samples look similar. The dominant aroma gets the highest weight in our identifier.
If you actually need to know what a regulated product is, the original package, batch or lot number and batch-specific certificate of analysis are much stronger evidence than any visual match.