Parabens are utilized as an antimicrobial preservative in many commercial offerings including cosmetics, personal care products and foods, and offer both chemical and thermal stability to products. Although parabens increase the safety of products, recent studies have suggested that parabens may exhibit weak endocrine disrupting effects on users of the products, an effect that can be further intensified by the ability of parabens to be absorbed by the skin without being broken done by esterase enzymes.
In this application note, a fast, robust and sensitive method utilizing a PerkinElmer LC 300 HPLC system with Multi-Wavelength UV/Vis (MWD) detector for the analysis of 2-phenoxyethanol and seven commonly used parabens in eight different commercially available cosmetic and personal care products is presented.