[valanton]

Perry said:

A trick you can use to determine if a finished product is o/w or w/o is to take a small sample and drop it in some water. If the drop of product starts to spread out and dilute then it’s o/w.  If it remains in a little ball with minimal interaction with the water, it’s w/o.

Wish I could do that! But I only have a bunch of ingredients lists, not the physical products.

[valanton]

jemolian said:

It goes back to the emulsification system. 

So are you asking if statistically if there are more W/O emulsifiers that enables formulation with a smaller water phase compared to oil phase, verse larger water phase compared to oil phase? 

Because not forgetting, even if there are more emulsifiers that of either one, it’s up to a formulator to choose which one they want to use and it can skewed towards one end because of certain reasons, so there are 2 factors to your thought.  

No no, I’m not asking about that. I just want to find out if it’s true that w/o emulsions usually contain less water than o/w emulsions. I’m not trying to define the type by the water content, I just want to get the picture of the difference of water content in these two types of emulsions. Say if you take 100 random o/w emulsions and compare to 100 random w/o, what will be the difference in average water content? Or there won’t be?

[valanton]

Microformulation said:

The percentage of water really has no impact upon determining if it is O/W or W/O. As @Bill_Toge quite correctly pointed out, you need to look at the emulsification system.

I totally get it! The ratio question is not about defining the type of emulsion. I’m just trying to understand whether if you take all w/o emulsions and compare them to all o/w, overall they’ll contain less water. Because I keep getting contradictory opinions: some say w/o statistically have less water, others say that due to recently developed efficient emusifiers the amount of water is the same.

[valanton]

Bill_Toge said:

the relative ratio of oil to water is irrelevant - the nature of the emulsion is determined entirely by the nature of its emulsifiers, as there’s no way for the system to ‘know’ how much oil or water is present

Thank you for the answer! From your experience, what is the water content in w/o emulsions you come across most often?