Since COVID-19 has become a global pandemic, there have been several guidelines published by organizations such as Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization on personal hygiene including, hand washing and hand sanitization.
This in turn has increased the demand for alcohol based sanitizers being tested by personal care product manufacturers. Hand sanitizer or the alcohol based rub are consumer products in the form of liquid or gel and are thought to generally be effective at killing microorganisms and decreasing infectious agents on our hands.
While there are a variety of hand sanitizers available, they can be classified into two major groups: non-alcohol and alcohol-based sanitizers. The alcohol-based sanitizers are typically the most popular and the versions that contain 60 to 95% alcohol are most effective.
Since the major components of alcohol-based hand sanitizers includes lower alcohols like methanol, ethanol, n-propanol and iso-propanol that are quite volatile, the prime testing method is performed using gas chromatography (GC). Like-dissolves-like is the principle of gas chromatography and hence a polar column selectivity like ZebronTM ZB-WAXplus is an excellent choice to separate the alcohols of interest far from each other.
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