Sixteen commercial dye samples and three liquid wastes from organic pigment and dye manufacture have been characterized without prior chromatography by thermospray ionization and low energy collision-activated dissociation of protonated molecules using a triple quadrupole mass spectrometer. Many samples contained precursors of the dyes and other by-products of the synthesis. Many of these components were identified by collision-activated dissociation experiments and by inspection of the chemistry of dye manufacture. Detection limits of 20-200 ng in the positive ion mode were obtained for seven dyes of the anthraquinone, triarylmethane, xanthene, coumarin, azo and sulfonated azo dye classes. Under conditions of negative ionization, detection limits for an anthraquinone dye and a sulfonated azo dye were about one order of magnitude higher. (Copyright (c) Organic Mass Spectrometry 1986.)