Abstract: Effective detection of metals in the environment and food is crucial to environmental protection and human health.Sample preparation is considered a key step in the whole analytical protocol since, besides being considered time-consuming, it is one of the most critical steps in terms of analyte losses and contaminations.Thus for improving the selectivity and sensitivity of metal analyte, extraction and clean-up steps are required.In this paper, the characteristics of new methods in metal ion pretreatment, such as cloud phase extraction, ionic liquids, dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction, headspace-solid phase microextraction, supercritical fluid extraction, and the advances in applications of which in the preparation of complex samples are summarized, and the direction for future development is proposed.