A high performance liquid chromatographic method was developed for the simultaneous determination of 10 synthetic colours such as indigotin，new red，brilliant blue，tatrazine，sunset yellow，amaranth，ponceau 4R，carmoisine，allura red and erythrosine in ice-cream. The optimal extraction conditions and HPLC chromatographic conditions were confirmed by investigating the extracting solvent，mobile phase type and maximum absorption wavelength. The sample was extracted with methanol water solution，and the extract diluted with water was separated on a Symmetry C18(25 cm×4.6 mm×5 μm）column using methanol - 20 mmol/L ammonium acetate as mobile phase by gradient elution. The target compounds were confirmed by diode array detection and quantified by the external standard method. Under the optimal conditions，the calibration curves of 10 synthetic colours showed good linearities in the range of 0.5-10.0 mg/L，with their correlative coefficients more than 0.997. The mean recoveries at 3 spiked levels of 2，10，50 mg/kg ranged from 76% to 108% with RSDs of 0.56%-2.8%. The detection limits were in the range of 0.2-1.0 mg/kg. The method was simple，rapid，sensitive and accurate，and was suitable for the determination of 10 synthetic colours in ice-cream.