RESUMO
The increased marketing of fake perfumes has encouraged us to investigate how to identify such products by their chemical characteristics and multivariate analysis. The aim of this study was to present an alternative approach to distinguish original from fake perfumes by means of the investigation of sodium, potassium, chloride ions, and ethanol contents by chemometric tools. For this, 50 perfumes were used (25 original and 25 counterfeit) for the analysis of ions (ion chromatography) and ethanol (gas chromatography). The results demonstrated that the fake perfume had low levels of ethanol and high levels of chloride compared to the original product. The data were treated by chemometric tools such as principal component analysis and linear discriminant analysis. This study proved that the analysis of ethanol is an effective method of distinguishing original from the fake products, and it may potentially be used to assist legal authorities in such cases.
RESUMO
Sugar cane spirits are some of the most popular alcoholic beverages consumed in Cape Verde. The sugar cane spirit industry in Cape Verde is based mainly on archaic practices that operate without supervision and without efficient control of the production process. The objective of this work was to evaluate samples of industrial and alembic sugar cane spirits from Cape Verde and Ceará, Brazil using principal component analysis. Thirty-two samples of spirits were analyzed, twenty from regions of the islands of Cape Verde and twelve from Ceará, Brazil. Of the samples obtained from Ceará, Brazil seven are alembic and five are industrial spirits. The components analyzed in these studies included the following: volatile organic compounds (n-propanol, isobutanol, isoamylic, higher alcohols, alcoholic grade, acetaldehyde, acetic acid, acetate); copper; and sulfates.