How about the da Vinci implants?

She has zero cleavage, skinny lips and a forehead the size of Fort Dix. At least, that's what plastic surgeons told artist Susan Barron, when she asked them if Mona Lisa needed any work done.
Any work? Try an eyelift, babe! And brow advancement. And a nose job, lip plumping, a couple of bodacious implants -- the surgeons' suggestions stopped just short of blond highlights and a tongue stud.
To Barron, who paints these proposed changes on prints of famous portraits, such excessive tinkering just proves her point: We live in an age when natural beauty is no longer enough. Now beauty requires a scalpel.
"The same ideals lasted for hundreds of years," says the New York artist. "That ideal has shifted."
She's certainly right that Paris Hilton would trump plump Venus de Milo today, as would artificial sweeties like Pamela Anderson. And she's also right to blame the usual suspects for this new idea of what's sexy: TV, movie stars, models. I'd add the fact there's a Victoria's Secret next to every Cinnabon in America. Unattainable ideals (and cinnamon buns) are in our face all the time.
But while Barron deplores the fact that pop-star perfection has become Middle America's goal -- to the point where 9 million Americans underwent plastic surgery last year -- I can't say I'm quite as appalled. Because I'm part of it.
A fraud
No, no boob job or anything. But as natural as I like to think myself, I, too, have availed myself of the latest medical technology in a bid to look better. My buck teeth buck no more, thanks to years of orthodontal attention. And with the help of a highly trained ophthalmologist, I now poke lenses into my eyes to make it look as though I don't need glasses. I'm a fraud, same as Joan Rivers.
Shallow we are. But are we significantly more shallow than the civilizations that came before us?
Seems like you could parachute into any place at any point in history and find women doing painful, even dangerous things to themselves, in a desperate effort to look good.
Chinese women bound their feet to the point where they couldn't walk. African women put rings around their necks that they couldn't take off, lest their necks droop and cause suffocation. Western women pulled their corsets so tight, they had trouble bending. And breathing.
So while the age of extreme makeovers is easy to attack as the age of extreme vanity, that's only because we have some weird new techniques at our disposal.
It's true that if Mona Lisa wanted to model today, she might well have to take the plastic surgeons' suggestions. Not because our beauty standards are so ridiculous but because beauty standards are always as ridiculous as current technology allows.
Who knows? With the right cosmetic dentist, she might even end up grinning.
XSkenazy is a columnist for the New York Daily News.