Abstract: HPLC was applied to determine food orange 8 (canthaxanthin) in cosmetics. The sample was extracted with methonal from water based cosmetics and cream cosmetics,or with a mixture of tetrahydrofuran and methonal from the oily cosmetics,powder cosmetics and lipsticks. The supernatant was separated by isocratic elution with XDB-C18 column as stationary phase,methanol and 0.05% (φ) trifluoroacetic acid (97+3) as mobile phase,then quantified by measuring absorbance at 470 nm. The detection limit (3S/N) was 0.5 mg·kg-1 and the quantization limit was 1.0 mg·kg-1. The recovery rates and RSD′s (n=6) were found in the range of 96.4%-105% and 0.49%-4.8% respectively.