Phoenix Artisan Accoutrements Teases Agua Dulce, A Florida Water Homage
Phoenix Artisan Accoutrements just teased their next release: Agua Dulce, an explicit homage to Florida Water. No firm date, no preorder, no scent breakdown. Just promo art and the words “Coming Soon. Stay Tuned.” It’s worth talking about anyway, because the source material is one of the most underrated splashes in the hobby and PAA is one of the few houses that can do something genuinely weird with it.
What is Florida Water?
Florida Water is a bracing citrus-and-spice cologne that’s been bottled essentially unchanged since 1808, when New Yorker Robert I. Murray put it out under what would become Lanman & Kemp. The “Florida” isn’t the state. It’s a nod to Ponce de León’s mythical Fountain of Youth, supposedly hidden somewhere in la Florida. It’s been on barbershop shelves for over two centuries because it works: bright sweet orange, lavender, clove, and a dry herbal undertone that sits right at the boundary between cologne, aftershave splash, and ritual cleanser.
That ritual angle is part of what makes Florida Water unusual. The same bottle of Murray & Lanman Florida Water that lives next to a barber’s clippers also lives in espiritismo, santería, and curandería traditions across Latin America and the Caribbean. It is used in spiritual cleansings (limpias) and blessings. Few aftershaves can claim to be both a $14 splash AND a sacrament. It’s also dirt cheap and effective, which is the other half of the legend.
Why it’s interesting that PAA is taking this on
Phoenix Artisan Accoutrements is the house Douglas Smythe and Frances Towle have been running out of Casa Grande, Arizona since 2012. Irreverent, often weird, partial to taking traditional categories and bending them sideways. The promo art tells you the flavor of bend they’re going for: an alien rising from a fountain, holding a black monolith and a DE razor, with UFOs in the sky and the actual Murray & Lanman bottle parked beside him. The tagline reads “Refresh. Renew. Transcend.” That’s not a Florida Water tribute. That’s a Florida Water 2001: A Space Odyssey crossover.
What’s more interesting is that PAA hasn’t really hit this category before. Other artisans have done their own Florida Water riffs (Stirling has Glacial Florida Water; bay rum dominates the adjacent slot), but PAA picking it up now, with explicit homage framing rather than rebranding, suggests they want to honor the heritage instead of just borrowing the name.
The name itself is the move that makes it work. Agua Dulce, sweet water, pulls toward the Spanish-Caribbean tradition rather than the Anglo-Florida-tourism one. That’s a smarter angle for a 2026 release than another bottle of “Florida Water” with a redesigned label.
In the meantime
If you’ve never tried the original, and a startling number of wet shavers haven’t, it’s the cheapest education in shave-splash history you’ll find. Splash a little after a clean shave, especially in summer, and it’ll tell you everything you need to know about what PAA is trying to live up to. Want a modern artisan splash in the same family while you wait? Buccaneer Bay Rum is the TWSS-house tropical-spice splash, similar barbershop heritage, similar after-the-chair energy. Or scroll down for two more picks in the same family.
We’ll cover Agua Dulce again the moment Phoenix posts a release date.