In this work we report a preliminary study of Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy on normal and neoplastic human skin samples suffering from two kinds of cancer, namely epithelioma and basalioma. The analyzed skin samples have been drawn from different parts of the human body, after biopsies. By performing a complex band deconvolution due to the complexity of the tissue composition, the analysis within the considered frequency region (900-4000 cm(-1)) of the collected IR spectra, allowed us, first of all, to characterize the presence of the pathologies and to show clear different spectral features passing from the normal tissue to the malignant one in particular within the region (1500-2000 cm(-1)) typical of the lipid bands. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.