iPhilter is an independent water filtration guide based in New Jersey. No store, no sales team — just plain-English help understanding what’s in your water, and honest reviews of the products that treat it.
Often searched as “aquafilter” — same love potion, different spelling. You’re in the right place.
Do you know what a “philter” is?
philter (n.) — a love potion; a drink or charm meant to make someone fall in love.
Love’s optional. Water isn’t.
The word comes from the Greek philtron, from philein — “to love.” It traveled through Latin into English, spelled philter or philtre — note the “ph,” not an “f.”
Open the dictionary and you’ll find it sitting right after “philosophy” — love of wisdom, then love potion, side by side on the same page. Same ancient root, phil-: to love.
Famous philters in story
- Tristan and Isolde — the great love-potion tale. They mistakenly drink a philter brewed for someone else’s wedding and fall hopelessly in love. (Wagner made it an opera.)
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream — Shakespeare’s version: juice from the “love-in-idleness” flower, squeezed onto sleeping eyes. Comedy ensues.
- L’elisir d’amore — Donizetti’s opera about a peasant who buys a “love elixir” (actually cheap wine) to win his beloved.
- Amortentia — the most powerful love potion in Harry Potter. A philter by any other name.
Here’s how the word found us: over a Scrabble board with a neighbor, in Palm Beach Shores, overlooking the Palm Beach inlet. A triple-word-score kind of discovery — and it became a company name.
It figures — the word was found by someone who reads a huge, heavy, red Webster’s dictionary and encyclopedia for fun. It’s still on his shelf today.
In 1998, the company started life in Palm Beach County, Florida, with a perfectly sensible name: Aqua Filter. It said what it did. It did what it said. And it was completely forgettable.
Then the word ‘philter’ turned up on a Scrabble board — a love potion, from the ancient Greek. A word so obscure that even James Patterson didn’t know it when asked about it in person. But look inside it: there, hiding in plain sight, are the two letters every water professional checks first — pH.
In 2004, Aqua Filter became Acqua Philter. A name that described became a name with a soul — and plain drinking water became water worth falling in love with.
And here’s something I found out about my own name that same year, still makes me smile. “Philter” comes from the Greek word philtron — a love charm. But the Greeks used that same word for something else: the philtrum, that little groove between your nose and your upper lip. So a philter has been sitting right under your nose for over 2,000 years — without you knowing it.
And that groove carries a story of its own. Folklore says it’s the mark of an angel’s finger: before you’re born, an angel presses a finger to your lips — shhh — and seals away everything you knew before you got here. That’s deep to a lot of people. It is to me too.
Hidden in plain sight, doing its job, waiting for somebody to notice. That’s my kind of word.
Keep the magic a secret.
And then there’s our spelling: pHilter
pH — the measure of acidity in water, and the first thing any water professional tests. Filter — what we guide you to. The name is the method: check the pH, then filter. (The “C” in our original “aCqua”? That was “see” all along — see the pH in your water.)
So the name works twice: a love potion for water — because once you taste truly clean water, you fall in love with it — and the first rule of water treatment, hiding in plain sight.
iSee, iPour, iDrink.
Read Our Promise: how we write about water.
“Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.”
W. H. Auden