The first step toward construction of a hybrid optical detector like THEIA is the demonstration of separation of scintillation and Cherenkov light in liquid scintillators (LS). This would allow reconstruction of particle directionality in a low energy threshold detector, and provide improved particle identification. The CHESS experiment successfully images Cherenkov rings on LS such as LAB and LAB with PPO, demonstrating this separation. Despite the relatively high light yield of the scintillation light with respect to the Cherenkov light, the latter is successfully identified thanks to the characteristic prompt emission time of a few picoseconds, as oppose to the typical nanoseconds delays of the scintillation emission. Low time jitter PMTs ($\sim300ps$) and fast digitization ($5GHz$) provides a precision well below the nanosecond level, making the time separation possible. Recent results obtained with pure LS and preliminary studies for newly developed water-based LS materials will be presented.