Quality control criteria of active volatile ingredients in the commercial mouthwash products are not sufficient and not probably specify the quantity of active herbal ingredients. Therefore, it is important to apply the most recent advanced techniques including chromatographic methods as GC, HPLC and HPTLC for analysis of these active volatile ingredients. Comparison of different methods was carried out depending on their validation parameters to choose the best method for analysis.. The total amount of volatile ingredients in all the selected mouthwashes was in the effective limit.
HPTLC was the simplest method for identification of volatile ingredients. Moreover, HPLC technique was recommended instead of GC for determination of volatile ingredients that have chromophore in the commercial mouthwash products as resulted from their validation parameters, as well as GC analysis needs a lot of extraction solvent that lead to loss of active volatiles.