The development of oil-in-water nanoemulsions for application as demulsifiers has attracted a great deal of interest from chemical supply companies in the oil sector, due to the cost savings and advantages of replacing organic solvents with water. In this study, the efficiency of the nanoemulsions developed in a previous work in breaking down water/oil emulsions was correlated with assessments obtained by interfacial rheology studies of the systems used in the preparation of model emulsions. The results show that the performance of nanoemulsions developed for breaking oil emulsions depends on the oil phase used in the system's composition and droplet size distribution. The results obtained from the interfacial rheology confirmed the activity of dodecylbenzene sulfonic acid (LBS) in dispersing asphaltenes in the demulsification step, resulting in more fragile and less elastic interfacial films. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.