Determination of synthetic phenolic antioxidants in essence perfume by high performance liquid chromatography with vortex-assisted, cloud-point extraction using AEO-9

This study aimed to establish a rapid analytical method to determine antioxidants in essence. A simple, efficient and practical, vortex-assisted, cloud-point extraction (VACPE) procedure is proposed for extracting and pre-concentrating four different of synthetic phenolic antioxidants (SPAs), propyl gallate (PG), tert -butylhydroquinone (TBHQ), butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA), butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) in essence prior to high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) analysis. The non-ionic surfactant, fatty alcohol polyoxyethylene ether-9 (AEO-9), was used as extractant and vortex-mixing was utilized to reduce extraction time and improve extraction efficiency. The effective parameters of the extraction process, such as volume of extraction solvent, pH, vortex-mixing time, equilibration temperature and time, were optimized. Under the optimum conditions, the linear range of PG, TBHQ, BHA and BHT was 8.0–800   ng/mL. All correlation coefficients of the calibration curves were higher than 0.996 and relative standard deviations (RSD, n   =   5) were 2.36%–5.46%. The proposed method was successfully applied to the extraction and determination of antioxidants in essence samples with satisfactory relative recoveries of 89.4%–103.5%. The results confirmed the SPAs of essence could be effectively monitored by this method and also established good reference criteria for essence.