Make the Quality Control of Essential Oils Greener: Fast Enantioselective GC-MS Analysis of Sweet and Bitter Orange as a Case Study.

Quality control of essential oils is fundamental for verifying their authenticity and conformity with quality standards, ensuring their safety and regulatory compliance, and monitoring their consistency. Companies that produce or market essential oils routinely evaluate the quality and authenticity of their products. However, they also must deal with increasing attention to environmental sustainability as well as practical considerations such as productivity, cost, and simplicity of methods. In this study, enantioselective gas chromatography (GC) was adopted to evaluate the quality of sweet and bitter orange essential oils, used as a case study. The analytical conditions were optimized and translated to fast GC to evaluate the impact of this approach on the environmental footprint of the analyses. The greenness of fast GC, compared with conventional GC, was quantitatively evaluated using a dedicated metric tool (AGREE), and important improvements have been calculated. The developed methods were applied to a set of commercial essential oils, and the data about the enantiomeric composition and relative percentage abundance were elaborated through multivariate statistics (principal component analysis). The results showed that fast chiral gas chromatography enables the classification of citrus essential oil samples and can be considered an environmentally friendly and sustainable approach for evaluating their quality.

Ionic liquids as water-compatible GC stationary phases for the analysis of fragrances and essential oils: Quantitative GC-MS analysis of officially-regulated allergens in perfumes.

Qualitative and quantitative determination of volatile markers in aqueous based fragrances assumes ever-increasing importance, because of both the need for quality control and the safety-regulatory limitations introduced for several compounds. This study reports and critically discusses the results of applying new water-compatible ionic-liquid (IL) GC stationary phases, based on phosphonium and imidazolium derivative cations combined with trifluoromethanesulphonate (Watercol™) to the direct quantitative analysis of aqueous samples in the perfume field with GC-MS. Narrow-bore columns of different lengths, especially prepared for this study, were adopted to minimize the amount of water reaching the MS detector after GC separation. All GC-MS analysis steps were investigated, to achieve results compatible with quality control requirements for the volatiles of interest in this field, in terms of LODs, LOQs, and repeatability. Reliability of the GC-MS results was demonstrated by determining volatile allergens in two commercial perfumes, as per EU regulations concerning no-declaration limits for leave-on (0.001%) and rinse-off (0.01%) cosmetic products.