There was a time when for the right folks there was no such thing as being too rich or too thin. Life was simpler then. Now for the right folks, and lots of others besides, there's also no such thing as being too young.

If shedding fat is mass culture, shedding years is increasingly the culture of society's image-makers and values-setters.

There is the notion, really taking hold for the first time, that one can beat the angel of death through right living, along with good chemistry and some highly skilled doctors. The respected inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil argues that right living could fend off death until science figures out how to extend life indefinitely.

The achievements in the war against aging, or at least its appearance, are already impressive, led by Botox and face lifts, and there's also the promise of nanocueticals, cellular therapy, stem cells and human growth hormones.

Enter Elixir, a magazine due out in mid-October that aims to ride the public's growing fascination with the war against years. Its founder and editor is Avril O’Connor, a Londoner. Says O’Connor: “It is not totally about vanity. It is about healthy aging, but the side effect is that you do look better. There is a growing aging population, and people don’t want to have the disabilities their parents have.”

She sees it as a global issue, noting that populations are aging in many developed countries around the world.

O’Connor believes that the magazine, a monthly based in London but with global ambitions, will be the first quality consumer glossy devoted to anti-aging and rejuvenation. It is, in fact, the offshoot of a web site, elixirnews.com, that O’Connor started 18 months ago. She says it now attracts 5,000 visitors a week.

She says she’s launching Elixir because she believes a print vehicle is more appropriate for longer features, whereas the site works best for news. She decided to launch the site after noticing the growing interest in staying young through her work as a journalist, along with the growth in spending globally for anti-aging remedies.

Her magazine will be fact-based, she says. “The articles are medically accurate.” To ensure that, she's created a medical advisory board that includes the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, a body of 18,500 physicians and scientists in 85 countries. Elixir is being backed by a consortium of private investors, and O’Connor says the first issue has already attracted a flush of advertisers.

Elixir will begin small, with a circulation of several thousand and will sell for $5.60 on select newsstands in hotels, spas and gyms around the world. The target audience: the 30-plus set with high disposable incomes.

Still, Elixir could have a rough go of it, starting small and without the support of a major publishing house, as one London media person, Alex Randall, head of press at Vizeum in London, notes: “Very few independent launches succeed -- whoever they are aimed at."

But there's certainly no doubt the timing is ideal, with the baby boomers now slipping into their wrinkle years.

“This is a generation that felt their power at a really early age,” says Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, “and now to an extent it is a generation that is refusing doggedly to go gently into old age.”

But there's also at work the raised expectations that science has brought about. People assume that the effect of aging can be conquered, and ought to be. Says Thompson: “Fifty can be the new 30 because technology allows it to be so.”