I don't mean to suggest that extremism is inherently evil, or even particularly bad. Wanting things to be as powerful or as fast or as huge as can be achieved has driven the degree of progress in the past few decades to surpass that attained in the previous few centuries—but I think that we may have gone a little too far in our collective quest for the ultimate, extreme, to-the-max version of everything. While it's certainly a credit to the modern age that an extra thirty cents will buy enough french fries to feed Somalia, there are instances in which we could—and should—exercise a bit of moderation.

... coif in point ...

A woman (I think) with Jurassic-era facial features can look a bit less like Mister Ed by adding volume to her hairstyle, which will change her overall appearance from simply ugly to merely unsightly—and in many cases, that's the best a person can do. If she pushes the edge of the envelope, super-sizes that perm, the result is utter dominance in the enterprise-class Olympic ugly competition. This is, after all, the paragon of "extreme": could a weepy eye and smallpox scars make her any more hideous?

If so, I wouldn't want to see it.

As usual, I find myself desperately groping for that silver lining, and the best I can come up with is this: if you're ugly, that's perfectly OK. Millions of other people feel your pain. But when you undertake extreme efforts to accentuate the very features that make you that way, until you look like the missing link in the evolution of Michael Jackson, that pain that others feel isn't for you, but because of you.