What's our obsession with anti-aging?

The only real solution to ageing is, of course, death. But our way of dealing with that inevitability is to to delay and deny it. Amanda Hess examines our obsession with anti-ageing.

There is something telling about the moments when we, as a culture, all agree to make a change that feels right and good and true, then go on behaving in approximately the same way that we did before. Consider the September issue of American magazine, Allure.

On the cover, the 72-year-old actress Helen Mirren wears the tattooed arm of a 20-something guy slung around her neck as if it’s the hot new accessory. Allure calls her “the hero we need” as the magazine enlists the beauty industry in its new pet cause: “the end of anti-ageing.”