The high-pressure homogenizer (HPH) is, together with the rotor-stator mixer (RSM), the standard equipment for emulsification in many fields of chemical processing. Both give rise to intense turbulence which, in turn, gives rise to drop breakup. Previous investigations focus on average turbulent disruptive stress. However, turbulence is a stochastic phenomenon and drop breakup will be characterized by instantaneous stresses, or more specifically by the probability distribution of instantaneous turbulent stresses. This study uses high-resolution particle image velocimetry (PIV) data to measure the probability distribution of turbulent stresses in the HPH. It is concluded that stress distributions approximately follow a lognormal model and that the skewness of the distributions decreases with increasing distance from the gap exit until a constant distribution shape is obtained at the position where the turbulence is fully developed. This converged stress distribution is similar to that obtained for RSMs in previous studies, suggesting that stress distribution shape is a general property. Moreover, large differences are observed when comparing these experimental stress distributions to the most widely used expression for describing this stochastic effect in fragmentation rate models. This indicates that the traditionally used fragmentation rate models can be fundamentally flawed, at least in relation to RSM and HPH emulsification. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.