In biomedical optical spectroscopy tissue-mimicking phantoms have been widely used for imitating optical properties of biological tissues. As tissue is a turbid medium involving scatterers, absorbing and fluorescing molecules, modelling a tissue in the form of a phantom should have the same realistic complexity comparable to that of tissues. In optical spectroscopy, fluorescence phenomena have been extensively investigated as an optical technique for disease diagnosis. The fluorescence signal is distorted by optical properties of a biological tissue. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the use of Intralipid as a scattering agent in a turbid medium containing fluorophores can affect fluorescent intensity by the phenomena of scattering and collisional quenching. The results indicate that phantom sets with different concentrations of Tyrosine and Intralipid have their emission peaks distorted at 300 nm and also show secondary peaks when used for fluorescence studies in UV region. © 2011 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.