Cooking oil fume is one of the important sources of atmospheric volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which are the key precursors of ozone and secondary organic aerosols in air. In this study, the production of cooking oil fume was simulated by heating typical pure vegetable oils (peanut oil, sunflower oil, soybean oil, olive oil and blend oil) at different temperatures in beakers to investigate the VOCs emission characteristics. The emitted VOCs were sampled with a Tenax adsorption tube and analyzed using GC-MS after thermal desorption. The results showed that the emission of VOCs increased with the increase of the heating temperature for all the investigated cooking oils, and at a given temperature, the blend oil emitted the lowest amount of VOCs. The VOCs emission intensity at different heating temperatures fitted well with binomial equations and ranged from 1.6-11.1 mg x (kg x min)(-1).