(Photo: Kenneth Chen)

When you get a typical salon blowout, a stylist tugs your tresses into submission for nearly an hour, and they usually go limp and frizzy by the next day. Then there’s Simon Sabag. In an astounding fifteen minutes—which suits his busy clients, who run the gamut from socialites like Veronica Hearst to edgy girls like Chloë Sevigny—he can transform even the thickest, curliest, most out-of-control hair into a straight, shiny mane full of body and bounce. He gives the top some height and the ends a subtle flip under, and somehow it all stays that way for days. Sabag dismisses the difference between himself and his peers as a mere matter of “the angle of the brush”; clearly, the man’s a whiz at geometry. ($65 at Simon Salon, 874 Lexington Avenue, at 65th Street; 212-517-4566.)

Related:

• Archive: “Best of New York Weekly”
• Articles by Beth Landman
• Table of Contents: December 8, 2003 issue of New York | Subscribe!