View article

Determining the origin of cosmetic traces is an important aspect of forensic investigations, that helps linking a suspect to a crime. Such type of evidence can help further narrow down the undergoing investigations. This paper reports the first use of Raman Spectroscopy (RS) coupled with the exploratory principal component analysis (PCA) and supervised partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) in facial creams. 40 facial cream samples of 8 different brands were studied in this work. Preliminary assessments through visual inspection of their Raman spectra revealed the presence of oxides, titanium dioxide, castor seed oil, and beeswax. Also, the peaks of alkyne groups were indicative of the presence of talc or mica compounds. The exploratory PCA correctly segregated the samples into 8 clusters and the supervised PLS-DA model correctly classified them into 8 classes. Further evaluation of the …