Experimental studies used for evaluation of quality of the fire-fighters protective clothing are based on irradiation of the clothing sample by an external pulse of a given duration. The other side of the clothing sample is in contact with a material imitating the human skin, which has properties different than these of the skin. Therefore the problem considered in this paper was: what conditions should be satisfied to convert the experimental results, carried out on the stand with a skin-imitating material, to the case of the real human skin with different properties for which the experiments are not made? This will allow for better evaluation of the clothing protecting properties and estimation of the possible burns. Due to multilayer structure of the protective clothing and skin as well as complex phenomena involved in energy transfer through them the problem is very complicated. Therefore at the first attempt to solve the problem a simplified two-layer, clothing-skin system irradiated from external heat source was considered in the present paper. Temperature variation in the system was initially determined using the inhouse 1D numerical code accounting for heat conduction in the skin and clothing, non-grey thermal radiation absorption, scattering and emission together with the water vapour diffusion and phase transformations of bound water to the gaseous phase in the protective clothing. Then the analytical model for temperature variation in the considered system was proposed and solved using the Laplace transform approach. In the latter model water vapour diffusion with its phase transformations were excluded and radiation emission was neglected. The analytical model allowed for deriving a formula which can be applied for converting the skin surface temperature obtained from the experiments carried out using the skin-imitating material to the material having skin properties. In order to verify the range of validity of the formula the analytical predictions were compared to the results of numerical simulations of temperature in the protective clothing-skin system considering cases in which different phenomena were included. For the majority of the cases studied good matching between analytical and numerical results was obtained for time corresponding to the heating and cooling processes of the protective clothing-skin system. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.