Vitamin E is a natural antioxidant with important physiological functions,which content in food seems so significant to determine.Sample pretreatment toward vitamin E is essential as it is the most important procedure which will take the longest time during separation and determination.Under this circumstance,the efficiency,validity and reliability of evaluation on natural vitamin E mainly depend on sample pretreatment,i.e.extraction methods.In recent years,a lot of work has been done in this field,and a great variety of novel extraction methods for vitamin E have been developed,which have been verified to be simple,effective and reliable.In this paper,the extraction methods such as saponification,direct solvent extraction,pressurized liquid extraction,supercritical fluid extraction,solid phase extraction and their applications are briefly reviewed,their merits and drawbacks are also summarized.In the end,the development tendency for sample pretreatment is proposed.