Cosmetic products containing illegal whitening agents are still found on the European market. Theyrepresent a considerable risk to public health, since they are often characterised by severe side effectswhen used chronically. The detection of such products at customs is not always simple, due to misleadingpackaging and the existence of products containing only legal components. Therefore there is a need foreasy to use equipment and techniques to perform an initial screening of samples.The use of attenuated total reflectance-infrared (ATR-IR) spectroscopy, combined with chemometrics,was evaluated for that purpose. It was found that the combination of ATR-IR with the simple chemometrictechnique k-nearest neighbours gave good results. A model was obtained in which a minimum of illegalsamples was categorised as legal. The correctly classified illegal samples could be attributed to the illegalcomponents present.