(FORTUNE Small Business) – These days everyone I meet brags about some new custom product that fits their tiny wrist or bulging thorax. Look, I want to shriek, I've never had an easy time finding hats to fit this pumpkinesque head. But you won't catch me taking a tape measure to it and transmitting the data to hats-for-mutants.com. I refuse to become yet another victim of X-treme Customization, as those of us in the know (me, so far) have dubbed it.

X-treme Customization is everywhere. Not long ago cellphone users were satisfied with proclaiming their questionable uniqueness by downloading musical ringtones from their favorite pop artists. Now, "it's not enough to choose a ringtone," says Richard Resnick. "You've got to make your own."

Resnick is CEO of Harmony Line, a one-year-old company in Cambridge, Mass., that is adapting powerful music-composition software developed at MIT so that teenagers can disrupt their biology classes with distinctively distracting ringtones. "Making your own satisfies a fundamental human need," theorizes Resnick, 34, who plans to launch the service nationwide in January. "Innately, you want to feel that you are an individual."

What happened to expressing yourself the old-fashioned way--by shrilly demanding, say, a buckwheat pillow at every hotel you haunt? I'm glad you asked. Before the Industrial Revolution (think cotton gin), everything was custom-built and expensive. Then came cheap, mass-produced goods such as the Model T. In the 1980s plummeting technology costs and the Internet gave us "mass customization," spawning made-to-order jeans and pick-your-parts PCs.

But for my money, customization has gotten out of hand. And I'm not the only one. "Some products ought not to be customized in every way possible," says Joseph Pine II, co-founder of Strategic Horizons, a consulting firm in Aurora, Ohio. "But the technology moves ahead, and the companies figure they should do it because they can." The worst offenders, says the 46-year-old Pine, include makers of DVDs and print-on-demand books where users can choose the ending they want. "There ought to be a logical progression in the narrative," he says.

"If you give consumers too many choices, they get overwhelmed," says Mark Dwight, CEO of Timbuk2 in San Francisco. The $15-million-a-year messenger-bag manufacturer has seen its online customization business grow dramatically over the past two years. "But we have learned not to give customers infinite options," says Dwight, 45.

Shirttailor.com absorbed that lesson the hard way. The company was forced to simplify its custom-shirt measurement system, says founder Rick Kearney, because "we were putting people in charge of figuring out their own sizes, and they had never done that before." Even so, Shirttailor.com eventually went under. Could it be that S, M, L, and XL would have worked better?

For every customization skeptic there are ten evangelists such as Ben Serotta, whose Saratoga Springs, N.Y., company, Serotta Competition Bicycles, makes customized bikes. Serotta reached record sales of $18 million (at retail) last year. And fetishists don't fret the fitting, which can take three hours. "Customers use the bike to make a statement about themselves," says Serotta, 51.

Me, I just want a bike that lets me pick up my minimally customized pizza (half broccoli, half pepperoni). Besides, X-treme Customization is fast becoming commoditized. What's next? "Homogenization will be the in thing," jokes Dwight. Indeed, generic white T-shirts have long been popular among fashionistas. I'd wear them myself, if I could only find one that fits over my Rushmore-scale skull.