One of the parameters analyzed to determine the quality of diesel oil is its ASTM color. Changes in color may be indicative of problems in the production process, contamination, degradation or the oxidation of diesel. The methodology recommended for determining the color of automotive diesel oil samples is the colorimetry according to standard ASTM D 1500, in which a sample is introduced into a glass cell and the color of the sample is compared with an optical filter color scale. Although it is very simple, the manual method requires good visual acuity from the operator. This procedure becomes somewhat subjective in some cases since different operators can make distinct evaluations of the same sample. In this way, this work proposes the development of a spectrophotometric analysis methodology to eliminate the subjectiveness in the determination of ASTM color of diesel oil samples by using operator-independent parameters and making quality assay more accurate and precise. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.