Safety Assessment of Arsenic in Cosmetic Face-creams by Inductively Coupled Plasma Atomic Emission Spectrometer

This paper presented the arsenic determination in four different brands of cosmetic face-creams to provide valuable information on the safety levels for consumers. The cosmetic samples were decomposed by acidic digestion method and then taken for arsenic quantification using inductively coupled atomic emission spectrometry (ICP-AES). The digestion efficiency of acid mixtures including concentrated HNO3, HNO3–HClO4, HNO3–H2O2 and aqua regia was discussed in terms of digestion loss and time consumption. The ICP-AES analyzing results, with determination recoveries of 95.4% ~ 105.2% and relative standard deviations less than 3.0% (n = 5), revealed arsenic contents in the face-creams are in the ranges of 0.68 ~ 3.28 mg·kg−1. Obviously, the arsenic contents in some of the studied brands exceed the maximum recommended value of 2.0 mg·kg−1 set by China. These results lead to the conclusion that constant control of arsenic content in cosmetics should be seriously considered. The successful arsenic determination in cosmetic face-creams by digestion pattern of concentrated HNO3, with simplicity, higher efficiency, less reagent consumption and less analytical time well demonstrates the good analytical capability of this method, promising a great possibility for large batches of cosmetic toxic metal monitoring.