Determination of 17 Characteristic Ingredients of Plant Extracts in Hair Growth Cosmetics by Ultra High Performance Liquid Chromatography

A method was developed for the simultaneous determination of 17 characteristic ingredients of plant extracts, including paeoniflorin, hydroxysafflor yellow A, calycosin-7-glucoside ferulic acid, etc., in hair growth cosmetics using ultra high performance liquid chromatography (UPLC). Different cosmetic samples were extracted by ultrasonic-assisted extraction with the solvent of methanol/water (4:1, V/V) solution. After demulsified by the addition of appropriate amount of NaCl and high speed centrifugation, the supernatant was transferred and analyzed with UPLC. The separation was conducted on a Waters reversed phase column of ACQUITY UPLC CSH C sub(18)(50 mmx2.1 mm, 1.7 mu m), and the mobile phases were methanol and the solution of 0.05% phosphate in water. The detection was performed with a photodiode-array (PDA) detector. The linear range was 0.2-25 mg/L with correlation coefficients higher than 0.999. The limits of detection were within 0.3-1.5 mg/kg, and the limits of quantification were from 1.0 to 4.0 mg/kg. The average recoveries of 17 characteristic ingredients were within 93.5%-105.0%, with the intra-and inter-day precision (n = 6) less than 4.6%. This method was simple, rapid, with good-repeatability, and had been applied to the analysis of real samples.