Abstract
A novel simple method to detect vitamins in cosmetic products by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry(GC-MS) has been developed. Three vitamins(panthenol, cholecalciferol and tocopherol) were used for this study. Vitamins were prepared by dissolving in tetrahydrofuran(THF), and silylated with bis-trimethylsilyltrifluoroacetamide-trichloromethylsilane(BSTFA). Silated vitamins were separated on a fuses-silica capillary column coated with DB-5. The identification of each vitamin was accomplished by retention time and mass spectrum library search with a computer, and the quantitation was made in the selected-ion monitoring(SIM) mode of GC-MS. SIM mode had given sensitivity to determine 50pg of panthenol, 285pg of cholecalciferol and 130pg of tocopherol. Linearity was maintained over the range 0.005-0.20% for each vitamin. Each cosmetic product(i.e. hair tonic and lotion) was found to contain amounts of the vitamins. This method was sensitive and gave 77.5-99.9% recovery of each vitamin from these cosmetic products. From these results, we concluded that silylation with BSTFA followed by GC-MS analysis allows the simple, covenient and exact determination of panthenol, cholecalciferol and tocopherol.