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 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-aging.”

Inside, the editor Michelle Lee resolves to stop using the term “anti-aging” in her pages going forward, opting instead for a “celebration of growing into your own skin — wrinkles and all.” This is not to say that she will stop promoting products that promise to make women look younger: As she puts it, “No one is suggesting giving up retinol.” What Lee wants to change, at least to start with, is the “packaging and marketing” used to sell retinol. She seeks to embrace euphemism: “Changing the way we think about aging,” she writes, “starts with changing the way we talk about aging.” Elsewhere in the issue, an ad for a new L’Oréal Paris moisturizer — part of the Age Perfect line — promises to “get your rosy tone back” through a pseudoscientific process that “stimulates cell turnover from within” using ingredients like “Imperial Peony” and “LHA.” That ad also stars Helen Mirren.

The only real solution to aging is, of course, death, but our central mode of dealing with that inevitability is to delay and deny it. “In an era in which people actually live longer and longer,” Susan Sontag wrote in the 1972 essay “The Double Standard of Aging,” “what now amounts to the latter two-thirds of everyone’s life is shadowed by a poignant apprehension of unremitting loss.” In this culture, to age is to be erased — to be deemed irrelevant, disappear from magazine covers and popular films and get tucked away into facilities, managed and cared for. For women, it also means being turned from a coveted object into a disposable one. We spend our lives fighting our own disappearance.

Corporate interests have discovered that they can make a killing by selling coping mechanisms. The beauty industry grapples with all of this psychodrama most literally, constantly pushing the right psychological buttons to gain entrance to our medicine cabinets. It’s not just the elixirs themselves: The images, the celebrity spokespeople, the branded jargon and sales copy all work toward the same goal. They must paper over large and knotty things — our discomfort over our own mortality, our deep-rooted habit of valuing women largely in terms of their attractiveness, our growing sentiment that both ageism and gender roles ought to be things of the past — with a cheery promise that a little face cream will help.