Designing and optimizing surfactant formulations continues to be of great interest to many industrial endeavors. Many of these applications utilize an assortment of ingredients including electrolytes, alcohols and other interfacially active solutes. Using the Hydrophilic Lipophilic Deviation (HLD), and specifically Type III microemulsion structures, changes to amphiphilic behavior can be quantified. This study highlights the use of HLD parameters in predicting optimal formulations as well as approximating unknown surfactants using specific molar ratios of the binary surfactants. Mixtures of heterogeneous surfactants were evaluated and the nonideality determined, where the highest deviation was found using anionic-nonionic solutions. Further, the structure of the amphiphiles were considered using their respective HLD parameters, providing evidence that the K value relates to the lipophile length and may be observed in changes in surfactant solubility. Cc values were found to be analogous to HLB values and empirical regressions were provided for quick approximation. This work considered the colligative properties of microemulsions to address the effects of additional solutes to amphiphilic behavior. It was demonstrated that specific cations as well as interfacially active solutes like alcohols are able to shift surfactant HLD parameters as well as the microemulsion properties such as the solubilization parameter. A proposed colligative hydration model was successfully implemented, providing better predictions of optimum salinities for chloride salts for anionic amphiphiles than what is found in literature. The use of nonionic reference surfactant suggests the specific ion effects behave similarly towards an uncharged molecule as the colligative hydration numbers, hC, remained consistent. This approach was extended to alcohols where the hc values qualitatively agreed with the alcohol’s hydrodesimic numbers, hD, found through freezing point depressions. The general trend of increasing the alcohol alkyl length was observed, decreasing the alcohol's ability to interact with free interfacial water as it tends to partition further into the surfactant palisade layer. Ultimately the colligative approach provided evidence that the additive properties of polar solutes appear within the changes in amphiphilic behavior and can be utilized properly to return HLD to a colligative equation. Such an approach should be widely beneficial as formulators now can quickly screen and predict optimum formulations by simply using common additive properties of solutes such as size, valency, and hydration.