Quantitation of suspected allergens in fragrances Part II. Evaluation of comprehensive gas chromatography-conventional mass spectrometry

The European legislation requires that fragranced products are evaluated for their content in 24 compounds that are suspected to be skin sensitizers. Their quantitation in fragrance concentrates may not be achieved with GC-flame ionization detection (FID), due to the complexity of these mixtures and even comprehensive GC-FID does not provide sufficient resolution. This paper reports the first example of quantitation based on the hyphenation of comprehensive GC with a low-cost quadrupole MS. A detection frequency of 30.7 Hz can be obtained by monitoring a single ion. This allows a satisfactory evaluation of the area sum over the 2-3 modulations of a given compound and linear calibration curves are obtained. Analyses are completed within 35 min. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.