Quantification of aromatic amines derived from azo colorants in textile by ion-pairing liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry

Azo dyes can metabolize back to precursor aromatic amines (arylamines), which are potentially carcinogenic. The ISO 14362-1:2017 standard requires the determination of the arylamines, produced from textile samples, preferably by using the gas chromatography mass spectrometric (GC-MS) method. This paper presents an ionpairing high performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometric (LC-MS/MS) method for determining aromatic amines, derived from azo colorants, in both natural and synthetic textiles. The separation enables adequate apparent retention factor (k' > 2.1 for the most hydrophilic compounds) and has appropriate sensitivity without sample clean-up procedure. The background matrix constituents influence the quantification in even a 100-fold diluted sample, therefore, calibration requires background compensation. The method allows fast confirmation and quantification of twenty-five arylamines in complex matrices of textiles. The method was validated with success and used to both natural and synthetic textile proficiency test (PT) samples.