Development and validation of ultra-high performance supercritical fluid chromatography method for quantitative determination of nine sunscreens in cosmetic samples

A fast and simple utra-high performance supercritical fluid chromatography (UHPSFC) method has been developed for the determination of nine sunscreens (UV filters), namely 2-ethylhexyl-2-hydroxybenzoate (ES), ethylhexyl-methoxycinnamate (EMC), benzophenone-3 (BZ3), octocrylene (OCR), bis-ethylhexyloxyphenol-methoxyphenyl triazine (EMT), butyl-methoxydibenzoyl-methane (BDM), diethylamino-hydroxybenzoyl-hexyl-benzoate (DHB), ethylhexyl-triazone (ET), and diethylhexyl-butamido-triazone (DBT) in cosmetic samples. The separation was achieved with Acquity UPC2 Torus 2-PIC (100 x 3.0 mm, 1.7 mu m) column. The influence of key chromatographic parameters on resolution was evaluated. The optimal mobile phase was a gradient mixture of carbon dioxide and methanol containing ammonium acetate, at flow rate 1.2 mL min(-1). The back-pressure of the system was set to 150 bar and the temperature to 40 degrees C. The compounds were determined with diode-array detection at 280 nm, 305 nm and 340 nm depending on absorbance maxima. The proposed UHPSFC method provided separation of the nine target sunscreens within 2.5 min without labor-consuming sample pretreatment procedure. The method was validated according to the concept of the total error and the accuracy profile. The inter-laboratory reproducibility was evaluated between two independent laboratories (in France and Czech Republic). The reliability of the developed method was shown by application to commercial sunscreen-containing cosmetic sample obtained from French market. The measured limits of quantification showed the suitability of the proposed method for determination of UV filters considering the European Union requirements. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.