Quantitative Determination of some heavy metals in Lipsticks available in Iraqi market

Abstract

The U.S. FDA defines cosmetics as "articles intended to be applied to the human body...for cleansing, beautifying, promoting attractiveness, or altering the appearance." This includes a large number of preparations that have become an integral part of the modern human daily life, who starts to apply and use routinely from early morning. These products usually consist of mixture of chemical components derived from natural or artificial sources that are not free of toxic element traces resulting of combination of compenents themselves or environmental pollution. This materials such as carcinogens or mutagens or metal components may adversely affect human heals.Because of the lack of adequate studies on this subject, in addition to the fact that heavy metals are toxic substances to the human body so this research was aims to determine the concentrations of some heavy metals in some facial cosmetics (lipstick) that are available in the lraq market, either imported or locally manufactured. We collect 30 samples of lipsticks for 5 trademarks every trademark has 6 colors and applying the method of wet digestion and ashing, we weight 1 g of each sample of lipstick , then prepare the sample with high purity nitric acid 65% then drying and placed in the furnace on heat 550 ° and after cooling has been treated by high purity nitric acid again then determine the concentration of each of lead , cadmium, iron, copper, nickel, cobalt, chromium and zinc using flame atomic absorption spectroscopy. The results showed that the concentrations of lead and cadmium, iron, copper, nickel, chromium and zinc in lipstick were higher than the limit value allowed in drinking water, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the iron concentration only surpassed the limit value.