Abstract: A comprehensive analytical method based on high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) has been developed for the determination of 12 sunscreen agents in cosmetics. The cosmetic samples were extracted by methanol. The target compounds were separated on an SB-C8 column (250 mm×4.6 mm, 5 μm) in gradient elution mode using methanol and 0.1%(v/v) formic acid aqueous solution as mobile phases. The detective wavelength was 311 nm. The linear plots were obtained between 1.0 and 500 mg/L with good correlation coefficients larger than 0.9995. The limits of detection (LODs) for this method were in the range of 0.002~0.1 mg/L. The spiked recoveries of commercial cosmetics were in the range of 97.4%~107.5% with the relative standard deviations of 1.54%~4.98%. The results indicated that the developed method is simple, rapid, accurate and suitable for the determination of 12 sunscreen agents in cosmetics samples.

Key words: cosmetics, sunscreen agents, high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC)