Complex emulsion has attracted much attention due to its incompatible components and can be used as a template to prepare anisotropic materials. It has become a new hotspot of research for its special structure and properties. It is key to develop new methods that can easily and mass produce complex emulsion with tunable morphology of microstructure. In this paper, the methods to control the topo-logical structure of complex emulsions at home and abroad were emphatically described, mainly in-cluding microfluidics, phase separation, one-step high-speed shearing and stimuli-responsive regula-tion, and the advantages and disadvantages of different control methods were explained. However, the current reviews focus on the research progress of individual methods and do not compare differ-ent methods. It is a developing trend that the method of controlling the topological structure is simple, pollution-free, intelligent and mass-produced. The application of the complex emulsion in optical lenses, sensors, materials and biomedicine were introduced.