Growing older is often presented as a choice. Cosmetic treatments, so-called anti-ageing products and their close relations — “age defying”, “age perfect”, “slow age” formulas and so on — tend to frame evidence of the passing of time as problems to be fixed.

Not much has changed since Susan Sontag nailed women’s anxieties about ageing in her 1972 essay “The Double Standard of Aging”: “Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination — a moral disease, a social pathology.” 

In my fifties, as the inevitable ravages continue, I have been highly susceptible to anti-ageing formulas but experience also tells me cosmetic wizardry may be limited. And I can’t shake the feeling that our framing is off. What if we paid less attention to superficial tweaks, and more to a few basic interventions that will have a greater effect in the long term?