Investigation of parabens in commercial cosmetics for children in Beijing, China.

Parabens are one of the most common preservatives in cosmetics. Because allergenicity and cytotoxicity potential values are major aspects of preservative safety and parabens are xenoestrogens, safety levels of parabens have been restricted in "Hygienic Standard for Cosmetics" (2007 edition) by the Ministry of Public Health of China, and a high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) for the simultaneous determination of parabens is recommended. To investigate whether the commonly used parabens in children's cosmetics were at a safety level, 105 cosmetics for children were randomly purchased from the local market in Beijing and analyzed by the proposed HPLC method. The detection rate of methylparaben was the highest and the next was propylparaben. Among the 105 samples, two or more kinds of parabens were detected in 72 samples with concentrations ranging from 0.02% to 0.75%; 18 samples contained one kind of paraben with concentrations ranging from 0.002% to 0.06%. In this study, the contents of parabens in the 105 samples were all below the restricted levels.