Determining lead, cadmium and mercury in cosmetics using sweeping via dynamic chelation by capillary electrophoresis

International limits have been established for metal impurities in cosmetics to prevent overexposure to heavy metal ions. Sweeping via dynamic chelation was developed using capillary electrophoresis to analyze lead (Pb), cadmium (Cd) and mercury (Hg) impurities in cosmetics. The sweeping via dynamic chelation mechanism involves a large volume of metal ions being swept by a small quantity of chelating agents that were electrokinetically injected into the capillary to chelate metal ions and increase the detection sensitivity. The optimized conditions were as follows: Firstly, the capillary was rinsed by a 0.6 mM TTAB solution to reverse the EOF. The sample solution, which was diluted using 25 mM ammonium acetate (pH 6.0), was injected into the capillary using a pressure of 3.5 psi for 99.9 s. Then, EDTA was injected at -25 kV for 1 min from the EDTA buffer (25 mM ammonium acetate containing 0.6 mM TTAB and 5 mM EDTA), and the metal ions were swept and stacked simultaneously. Finally, the separation was performed at -20 kV using a separation buffer (100 mM ammonium acetate (pH 6.0)). A small quantity of chelating agents introduced into the capillary could yield 33-, 50- and 100-fold detection improvements for Pb, Cd and Hg, respectively, more sensitive than conventional capillary zone electrophoresis. Correlation coefficients greater than 0.998 indicated that this method exhibited good linearity. The relative standard deviation and relative error were less than 8.7%, indicating high precision and accuracy. The recovery value of the homemade lotion, which was employed to simulate the real sample matrix, was 93-104%, which indicated that the sample matrix does not affect the quantitative results. Finally, commercial cosmetics were employed to demonstrate the feasibility of the method to determine Pb, Cd and Hg without complicated sample pretreatment. Graphical Abstract The procedure of analyzing metal ions in cosmetics by sweeping via dynamic chelation.