A Combined HPLC-VIS Spectrophotometric Method for the Identification of Cosmetic Dyes

Abstract
Ion-pair reversed phase HPLC was observed to give very good separations of 20 representative cosmetic dyes whilst numerical analysis of VIS spectra provided an efficient additional means of identification when similar retention times for different dyes were encountered. The results strongly suggest that a combination of HPLC and rapid scanning VIS spectrophotometry should be very promising, especially when on-line computing facilities are available.