Garcia-Aguilar et al. [1] have shown that the deforma-
tions of “shape-shifting droplets”, reported in a series of
experimental papers spawned by Refs. [2, 3], are consis-
tent with an elastic model. Here we show that the inter-
play between surface tension and intrinsic curvature in
this model is mathematically equivalent to a physically
very different phase-transition mechanism of the same
process described previously [4, 5]. Hence, the models
cannot distinguish between the two mechanisms, and it
is not possible to claim that one mechanism underlies the
observed phenomena without a more detailed compari-
son of the predictions of both mechanisms with experi-
ments. We suggest that the increasing number of seem-
ingly contradictory experimental results indicates that
the two systems [2, 3] are different. The observed “shape-
shifting” processes are therefore likely to be similar out-
comes of two very different physical mechanisms