Abstract:

A chromatographic correlation spectroscopy method was developed for the rapid identification of 10 α-hydroxy acid substances in cosmetics. Spectral data processing and database management were performed using Labsolution software, with chromatographic peaks screened and identified through spectral similarity. The similarity algorithm, spectral preprocessing, spectral similarity threshold, and time window size were examined and optimised. Experimental results indicate that after background compensation and S-G smoothing of spectral data, setting the spectral similarity threshold to 0.99 and the time window size to 2%, and employing the cosine angle method for spectral similarity calculation, enables rapid and accurate screening and identification of the 10 α-hydroxy acid substances in cosmetics. Screening and identification of these 10 α-hydroxy acids in 164 cosmetic batches achieve an accuracy rate ranging from 93.90% to 100.00%, with an average accuracy of 97.80%. This represents an 11.20% improvement over methods relying solely on retention time for peak identification. This method is simple to operate and highly accurate, suitable for the rapid screening and identification of 10 α-hydroxy acid chromatographic peaks in cosmetics via HPLC-DAD. It provides technical support for establishing an HPLC-DAD-UV spectral database of safety-risk substances in cosmetics. This technology can be extended for rapid screening applications in areas such as intelligent chemical identification, detection of illicitly added prohibited substances in traditional Chinese medicines, identification of illegally added chemicals in foodstuffs, and monitoring of food additive misuse.

Key words: α-hydroxy acid, HPLC-DAD-UV spectral database, chromatographic correlation spectra, spectral preprocessing, chromatographic peak attribution