Multi-residual GC-MS determination of personal care products in waters using solid-phase microextraction

A multi-residual method is described for the simultaneous determination of 23 personal care products (PCPs), which display a wide range of physicochemical properties, present at trace levels in water samples. A one-step procedure was developed based on solid-phase microextraction (SPME) coupled with GC-MS analysis. A chemometric approach consisting of an experimental design (design of experiments) was applied to systematically investigate how four operating parameters--extraction temperature and time and desorption temperature and time--affect extraction recovery of PCPs in water. The optimum SPME procedure operating conditions, those yielding the highest extraction recovery for all the compounds, were determined; they correspond to an extraction time of 90 min and temperature of 80 °C and a desorption time of 11 min and temperature of 260 °C. Under these optimized conditions, the SPME procedure shows good analytical performance characterized by high reproducibility (RSD% intra-day accuracy varying in the 0.01-1.3% range) as well as good linearity and low detection limits (LODs lower than 2 ppb for most of the investigated PCPs).