Technical Abstract: The successful formulation of a lubricating emulsion requires carefully balancing the mixture of base oil, water and a plethora of additives. The factors that affect the performance of lubrication emulsions range from the macroscopic stability to the microscopic surface properties of the base oil. Presented is a review of some of the large body of literature devoted to this subject. Also presented is a short study on the use of chemically modified vegetable oil based aqueous emulsions and their performance in a variety of lubrication tests. Of note is that their coefficient of lubrication, a measure of how well a lubricant emulsion compares to that of its corresponding base oil, is at or above 1.0 for the biobased systems, and only ~0.5 for a petroleum-based lubricant.