Analytical Method Development for Determining Formaldehyde in Cream Cosmetics Using Hyphenated Gas Chromatography

Formaldehyde has been reported to be a potential human carcinogen due to its toxicity. However, formaldehyde releaser substances are still widely used as a preservative in cosmetics. Researchers have developed various methods for determining formaldehyde. One of the problems involved in the standard method is that of obtaining a derivatization agent, especially for routine analysis in the National Agency of Drug and Food, Indonesia. Therefore, this study aimed to develop a new method using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) and gas chromatography-flame ionization detection (GC-FID). The significant modifications involved optimizations of five series of concentrations of p-toluenesulfonic (PTS) acid in ethanol (acidified ethanol), used as the derivatization agent, and the conditions of time and temperature of the reaction to yield the highest peak area. In addition, sample analysis was also carried out using the 2,4-dinitrophenylhydrazine (DNPH) method with high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) to compare the quantification results. The validated method showed intraday and interday precision, an accuracy (% RSD) of less than 3.7%, confidence interval 95.0-105.0%, a limit of detection and quantitation of 0.0099 and 0.0329 μg/mL (for DNPH by HPLC-DAD), 0.0158 and 0.0528 μg/mL (for PTS by SHS-GC-MS), and 1.1287 and 3.7625 μg/mL (for PTS liquid by GC-FID), respectively. These results have met the requirements for a validated analytical method and could be applied for routine analysis.