The temperature was tropical, the theme Latin American and the hair definitely in a style Carmen Miranda would have appreciated. Yesterday morning, New Zealand-born crimper Patrick Cameron took over the Joseph Kramer Hair Studio on Dublin's Wicklow Street to raise funds for Harcourt Street Children's Hospital. Although his name may not be widely familiar to the general public, thanks to work with the Wella group and regular appearances on BBC television's Good Morning, in hairdressing circles Patrick Cameron qualifies as something of a celebrity.

He certainly has enough personality and well-honed conversational skills for the part, managing to be as voluble as his hairstyles were large. Rather unusually for a hairdresser, not once did he ask when and where anyone had been on holiday or whether plans had yet been made for going out over the weekend. Instead, his patter was reminiscent of a TV chef, so much so that, had he suggested popping your head into the oven at a medium temperature for 45 minutes, nobody would have been too surprised.

All the while, his hands were deftly moving over a succession of models' scalps. Unlike former President Ford, Cameron easily performed two activities simultaneously, cheerily throwing out banter as he knotted up hair.

"Don't worry that they're not the same colour," he remarked while weaving auburn and black plaits into Shannon Brown's hair which, contrary to her name was a glorious traditional red. "The whole point is to give a sense of glamour back into hairdressing." At this point, Shannon Brown had also acquired a large tiara of woven tresses, the whole held in place by a wealth of pins and lavish application of hairspray.

Thanks to both of these aids, the heat - causing even the trays of tortilla chips to wilt - had little visible effect on the finished hair. But Cameron took no risks with 13-year-old Elva Fogarty from Rathfarnham who had chanced to enter the salon with her mother and now found herself settling into one of the seats for a quick makeover. Her long blonde hair was tied up in a sequence of twists finished with a fan-like flick on the top. "It's very good," she said politely afterwards. "I'd definitely have it again." Provided, of course, that the sociable Patrick Cameron was on hand to do the job.