This paper concerns the second order marginals of biphased random media. We give discriminating necessary conditions for a bivariate function to be such a valid marginal, and illustrate our study with two practical applications: (1) the spherical variograms are valid indicator variograms if and only if they are multiplied by a sufficiently small constant, which upper bound is estimated, and (2) not every covariance/indicator variogram can be obtained with a Gaussian level set. The theoretical results backing this study are contained in a companion paper.