So recently I was refelting my shed roof and had the lovely job of using bitumen adhesive to secure the sheets of felt to each other before tacking them on.

If you have ever used bitumen then you will know that it is a stickly, oily, smelly, black substance that does not want to come off anything, including skin and clothes!

Obviously I was trying to avoid getting the bitumen on my skin but somehow I managed to get it all over the back of both of my arms.

Having not had to try and remove it before I had a look online as to how I would get it off (as soap really does nothing) and the main thing I found was that olive oil or cooking oil was the best bet.

Well I tried the olive oil method and it was pretty much useless. As I didn’t have any standard cooking oil I couldn’t actually try that.

But what I did have was baby oil and all I needed to do was to put a few drops of that on the affected area and it pretty much seemed to ‘dissolve’ the bitumen straight away.

All that was required after that was to wipe the resulting black mix off my skin with some tissue and you couldn’t even tell it had been there.

It strikes me that baby oil is a very kind method of treating your skin if you have got bitumen on it so I would certainly recommend using it if you find yourself in this situation.

I seem to remember that baby oil is useful for other things too, in particular those temporary tattoos that you can get. It takes those off pretty easily too. So if you haven’t got any at home I’m sure there are plenty of other things you can use it for (making skin soft for one thing!) so it might be worth getting hold of some.