What are the Allergens in our Body Spray and Perfume Bottles?

The cosmetic and beauty industry thrives off the allocation of products like makeup, fragrances, and skin care. As the development of new and more beauty products expand, the study of possible unknown or hidden compounds in those products intensifies. Many manufacturers claim that certain chemicals are present or some other are absent in their products, the validation or assessment of their claims is necessary. Chromatographic separation followed by mass spectroscopic analysis can be used for identification and quantification of interested compounds in beauty products. Gas chromatograph mass spectrometer (GC-MS) is useful for volatile samples and unknown detection. We are interested in testing allergen compounds possibly present in body sprays such as benzyl alcohol, which is reported as a common allergen among fragrance products. Our elution procedure was developed using Shimadzu QP2010 Plus GCMS system and bromobenzene was selected as the internal standard. Method validation resulted in good linearity for quantification of benzyl alcohol with the coefficient of determination values (R2) close to 1. However, it is found that no detectable amounts of benzyl alcohol were present among the body spray samples in our experiments, while coumarin and linalool, two other common allergens, were identified. Our current research focuses on the quantification of coumarin and linalool in a variety of body spray, parfum, and cosmetic products, and our findings will be summarized and presented. The exploration of allergens in cosmetic products can widen the understanding of personal and societal health in the beauty and cosmetic world.