Description:
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>As kojic acid is increasingly used in food and cosmetics, its safety issues have attracted more and more attention. Therefore, a label‐free fluorescent sensor was developed in this study for kojic acid content detection based on the fluorescence internal filtering effect between gold nanoclusters(AuNCs) and kojic acid. In the presence of kojic acid, the fluorescent signal dropped obviously due to the competitive absorption of excitation light of AuNCs. Under the optimized conditions, the sensor exhibits rapid and selective detection of kojic acid, the linear range is 10–1,000 μM (R<jats:sup>2</jats:sup> = 0.996) and the detection limit is 5 μM. The recoveries in real samples range from 97.4 to 104.3%. Furthermore, the sensor is low‐cost, convenient, time‐saving, and may hold great potential for future kojic acid detection.</jats:p>