A bare shoulder flashes on the screen to the riffs of a flamenco guitar. A feminine hand on an unclothed waist follows, and the gorgeous face of a dark-haired woman appears with--yikes!--all her wrinkles in living color. The camera pulls back, and -- double yikes! -- she's naked. Next, a grinning full-figured woman with silver-streaked hair. Then comes an age-spotted shoulder. Finally, a long-legged beauty with cropped gray hair and -- egads! -- a lined neck and a furrowed brow poses in the buff, save for a pair of dangling earrings and a cuff bracelet.

These stunning images, shot by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz, are the centerpiece of a counterintuitive new ad campaign by the maker of Dove soap to promote its latest line of beauty products. In its first global launch ever, Dove hopes to attract the 40 million or so baby-boomer women in the wrinkle-war zone with a provocative twist: instead of demonizing wrinkles with "antiaging" products, Dove celebrates them and calls its new line Pro Age. For the Anglo-Dutch consumer giant Unilever, Dove's $52 billion parent company, the stakes are high: total sales in 2006 grew just 4%.

Indeed, since 2004, Unilever's sales growth has been in the single digits, while key competitor Procter & Gamble, which owns rival beauty powerhouse Olay, is growing twice as fast and enjoying healthier profit margins (22% in 2006). Dove needs a hit, but in a global culture obsessed with looking younger, will the older-is-O.K. approach catch on?

"We live in an antiage culture, no question," says Susie Orbach, a British psychoanalyst and author, who helped conduct a Unilever/Dove-sponsored beauty survey of women in nine countries. Antiaging skin care accounts for nearly $13 billion in sales worldwide, according to Euromonitor, and it is on the way to $17 billion by 2010. Dove's study found that 91% of women over 50 feel they're not represented realistically in the media. "They feel invisible," Orbach says.

That's one thing the women in Dove's Pro Age campaign certainly are not. It builds on the success of Dove's "Campaign for Real Beauty," a series of ads with full-figured women that earned it every marketer's dream -- an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show. The Pro Age television, print and Web ads (one deemed too racy for broadcast TV) feature real women, not models, all age 50 or over. "We want to widen the stereotypical view of beauty," says Dove's U.S. marketing director, Kathy O'Brien, 42.

But it might not be that easy for Dove to overturn the mind-set against aging gracefully. Boomers might say they want to look their age, but how they spend their money is another matter. How else to account for the more than 4 million Americans who got Botox injections last year? The antiaging mantra has spread beyond face creams. Revlon makes a line of "age-defying makeup," and Crest makes "Rejuvenating Effects" toothpaste. Even winemaker Robert Mondavi has jumped into the beauty pool with a luxury antiaging skin-care line, Davi ($175 for a 2-oz. jar), packed with grape-seed extract, an antioxidant.