At the 23rd Perfumes & Cosmetics Congress, organised in Chartres on 19 and 20 November 2025 by Cosmetic Valley, Anaïs Jankowiak and Audrey Guibet, respectively Regulatory Toxicologist and Strategic Expert in Cosmetics & Personal Care at SGS France, provided key insights into PFAS and the latest developments surrounding them. After defining PFAS and detailing their regulatory environment, they discussed the analysis and testing methods that are essential for ensuring product compliance, and answered questions from conference attendees.
Second and final part of this article: following on from the definitions and origins of PFAS, their uses in cosmetic products and the regulatory framework in Europe and France, discussed in the first part, the analysis methodologies, future prospects and challenges, and the Q&A session that took place at the end of the presentation.
There are currently various measurement techniques available for detecting PFAS in the matrices analysed.
Audrey Guibet began by giving an overview of the main approaches, before detailing each one.
The different approaches
In the absence of a harmonised test to date, we can only draw up a non-exhaustive list of existing methods for detecting PFAS in consumer products.
And, as PFAS constitute a very large family of substances, not all of them can be covered by so-called targeted analyses.
Global approaches
It is therefore necessary to first use comprehensive analyses based on techniques that enable the molecular structure of PFAS to be analysed.
Fluoride measurement
Since PFAS are composed of fluorine atoms, it is possible to measure total fluorine by ion chromatography.
It is also possible to measure the AOF index, which corresponds to absorbable organic fluorine.
Detection of …
