GOJO is a pumice infused hand cleaner, basically soap on PEDs. It has a natural orange scent. If you would like to clean your hands, perhaps after doing some light bicycle maintenance, GOJO is a fine choice, assuming of course that you hate your skin, and you’d actually like to remove as much of it as possible. This may strike you as the first blow in a devastatingly scathing review, but it is not. Quite the opposite.
Normal soaps do a fine job removing normal dirt from normal hands, but the dirt implicit in bicycle maintenance is not normal. I imagine triceratops and velociraptors roaming the land in ancient millennia, a streak across the sky and an impact, and then of course some robber baron or consortium thereof exhuming the remains of those ancient creatures in the form of crude oil, which eventually finds its way to your bicycle chain. This “lube” is both lubricious, i.e. slippery, AND sticky in an odd way.
Rather like the question of how soap can ever be dirty, it’s worth asking how something that’s meant to keep things from sticking can itself be so sticky. This is no time for metaphysics though.
The point is that the dirt on your bicycle parts is impregnated with grease (a term I use generically here) or vice versa, so that, once it finds the small cracks and wrinkles in your skin, it takes something like soap mixed with ground up volcanoes to remove it.
GOJO is liquid sandpaper. And sometimes you are antique dresser in need of a refinish.
Do not, please, be fooled by the pleasant orange scent. Gojo is not edible. Nor does it make a good toothpaste, because actually it makes too good a toothpaste.
GOJO was invented by a lady named Goldie and her husband Jerry, who were answering the need of the fine folk who worked in rubber factories that supplied the American effort during World War II. Jerry, in fact, was the inventor of the portion control canister, the squeeze pump, for which he won a patent, and that allowed people like me to squirt the right amount of GOJO onto their palms, sniff it, consider eating it, and then use it for its intended purpose (most of the time).
Some of you will be familiar with a competing product called Lava. Lava has superior branding to GOJO, although its geological inaccuracy is a real sticking point for me. The front of the GOJO bottle says, “For removing grease, tar and oil,” straight to the point, no distracting volcano on the label, the bottle orange, like the product’s scent, with a bold blue complimentary color that connotes effectiveness rather than gimmick.
The bottom line is that your hands have never been so dirty that GOJO couldn’t clean them. Perhaps you used the product and didn’t come away with spotless hands, but that’s more a statement about your own ability to endure the exfoliatory machinations of this sublime goo. If you’re up for it, GOJO is too. It’s a scalable solution, like they say in high tech.
So get some, if you’ve got frequently dirty hands, or if you just kinda hate yourself. GOJO doesn’t judge.
I have a gallon jug of Permatex Fast Orange waterless hand scrubber that has lasted me years. Same idea, but different manufacturer. Probably both brands dig out the same pumice. The stuff works great after working on cars, motorcycles, or greasy bicycle chains. Wouldn’t enter the garage without it. I usually end up washing my hands with regular soap afterwards, but the orange pumice stuff gets the lion’s share of greasy grunge off.
Khal, you make a good point. This review may have been too useful.