J. Cosmet. Sci., 64, 67–72 (January/February 2013) 67 Investigation of parabens in commercial cosmetics for children in Beijing, China PING WANG, JIE LI, HANMEI TIAN, and XIAOJING DING, Beijing Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Beijing 100013, People’s Republic of China. Accepted for publication July 23, 2012. Synopsis Parabens are one of the most common preservatives in cosmetics. Because allergenicity and cytotoxicity po- tential 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. INTRODUCTION Parabens are preservatives added to cosmetic products for the primary purpose of inhibit- ing the development of microorganisms. Four parabens (methylparaben, ethylparaben, propylparaben, and butylparaben) were the most frequently used preservatives based on the data from the Voluntary Cosmetic Registration Program (1–4). Although the Cos- metic Ingredient Review Expert Panel support the safety of cosmetic products in which paraben preservatives are used (5), experiments have shown that parabens exhibited an estrogen-like property in vivo in an immature rat model, which expanded the current understanding of the potential adverse effects of parabens associated with their estrogen- like activities. Further investigation is needed to elucidate in greater detail the adverse effects of parabens in humans and wildlife (6). Although the endocrine-disrupting bioac- tivity of parabens is weakly estrogenic, exposure to multiple parabens at low concentra- tions may increase their synergistic estrogenic activities in rat pituitary lactosomatotrophic GH3 cells through a progesterone receptor-mediated pathway (7). Taking into account Address all correspondence to Ping Wang at ping_wang@tom.com.