The self-help category has a new niche: beauty books instructing baby-boomer women how to love those bits that sag, droop and give away their advancing years. The backlash against 'rejuvenation surgery' - the plastic surgery and chemical injections that promise to turn back ageing - has begun.

'Most women can't afford or justify cosmetic surgery but end up having it done because society makes them so desperately fearful and insecure about the impact of ageing,' said Christopher Hopkins, author of Staging Your Comeback: A Complete Beauty Revival for Women Over 45. 'We have been programmed to believe that only things outside our control, such as surgery or injections, can truly ameliorate the impact of ageing.'

Hopkins, a Minneapolis makeover expert, added: 'But more than ever we have the power to change and improve what Mother Nature handed us. Who would have imagined Raquel Welch being the face of MAC cosmetics at 62? For women today, anything is possible.'

The message is gaining credence in Britain, with a growing contingent of female celebrities and fashion gurus defiantly anti-surgery. Helen Mirren is so determined to age gracefully that she has turned down offers from private surgeons for free treatment. 'I'm very vain, but not fond of needles and scalpels. I will try to get away with make-up, jewellery and a nice frock.'

Joanna Lumley says that concealing ageing would jeopardise her career: 'If you're 61 and are offered the parts of grandmothers, there's no point in looking like a doll.'

Alex Shulman, editor of British Vogue, finds the very idea of surgery alarming: 'Feeling weird about getting older is tightly bound up with feeling weird about what one has not achieved in one's life thus far,' she said. 'If one is so competitive, wouldn't it make sense to opt out of a competition that can never be won?'

Oz Garcia, author of Redesigning 50: The No-Plastic-Surgery Guide to 21st-Century Age Defiance, agrees. A leading New York leading nutritionist, Garcia's book promises beauty with 'no silly, stupid diets and no crazy cosmetic surgery that makes you look grotesque. People are petrified of ageing, but you can age with beauty that is not just about being natural but about being intelligent and mature.'

A third book, Gracefully: Looking and Being Your Best at Any Age by American Valerie Ramsey, a 68-year-old mother of six, grandmother of seven and catwalk model, agrees that skin care, make-up, exercise and nutrition is more effective than surgery and injections.

'Although our perception of the over-forty club of women has finally started to change, we still live in a youth-obsessed culture,' she said. 'But the key to ageing gracefully is to be proud of your age without being confined to looking it.'

Ramsey says there are four rules to follow: 'The first step is acceptance of the ageing process, it's natural. You still look like you, only a new you. Then you must focus on the positive; the best thing about your age is that you've grown.'

Next, she says, women should find an age-appropriate role model. Finally, they should simply get on with life. 'While it's fine to like the latest teen queen and even be inspired by them, an older model will usually display courage, strength, and wisdom because they have lived long enough to earn them,' she said. 'Beauty is in the way a woman carries herself, in her energy and her presence.'

British plastic surgeons agree that the rush for surgery could be on the turn. Douglas McGeorge, president of the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, said: 'So many people have rushed into surgery over the past few decades that there will be those looking in the mirror this morning saying they have pushed the envelope too far.

'There will also be those starting to age who look at those women and realise surgery isn't the answer. These women recognise that ageing isn't necessarily something they need or want to hide.'

But Barry Jones, a Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons who carries out more non-private face lifts than any other plastic surgeon in Britain, is more sceptical. 'An ageing face has never been viewed as more beautiful than a young face,' he said.

But if the backlash is happening, Joan Smith, feminist and author of What Will Survive, said it can't come soon enough.

'I can't stand the way women beat themselves up over getting old - teenagers do it long before they have any real signs of ageing,' she said. 'Looking in the mirror tells you only half the story. This is something a lot of women seem to have forgotten - or never known - in a culture which actively encourages women to hate themselves.'