Local scientists and engineers are striving to concoct a simpler, less-invasive alternative to liposuction, using ultrasound transmissions to break up internal fatty acids.

If the technique works out, it could become as routine an upper-middle-class practice as breast implants or “permanent make-up” have become. From there, volume and technological advances might make it affordable to all (or at least to most).

I can see it now. Parents giving the gift of instant weight loss to daughters (and sons too) as 18th-birthday presents. Middle-aged couples routinely getting new summer bodies to go with their new summer wardrobes. Clinics offering annual visits on a membership plan. (Remember, the device would help you drop weight, but wouldn’t prevent you from gaining it all back.)

At the turn of the last century, in the first Gilded Age, obesity was considered an asset for “men of substance” (big bank and railroad bosses). It proved you could afford to eat well. These days, in the second Gilded Age, obesity symbolizes that you’re eating a fatty white-trash diet and can’t afford a personal trainer. The rich (and those desperately trying to become rich) follow fad diets and belong to private gyms. The working poor are often stereotyped as unkempt blobs of cellulite, forever gorging on Big Macs and Big Gulps.

But what if instant skinniness were available to anyone who with the cash (or credit-card room) for a new car? What if millions could simply walk into a clinic fat and walk out that same day skinny? Perhaps the upscale would run the opposite way, as if to the Sneeches’ Star-Off Machine. Perhaps voluptuousness would become the new ideal. Maybe the famale beauty standard of the 2010s could be the More of Everything woman—huge bosoms, huge butts, a roomy mini-mansion of a physique. And the new masculine ideal could be an SUV of a physique—a big-boned, big-muscled, big-waisted piece of solidity that stands large in the face of trouble, but also has plenty of sensitive soft spots for an ambitious lady to explore.

Alternately, the new body-type dichotomy could be rooted back at the gym. Ultrasound fat-removal would do nothing for muscle tone. (It might even conceivably leave some patients with flappin’ expanses of unshrunk skin.) The mark of a member (or wannabe member) of the elite might be a body that you’d still have to work for, not just pay for.