Washing up liquid and a good scrub with a green pan scourer is what I use.
Bit late to this conversation, but after any spannering I often wash my forearms with WD40 and a rag to get the worst of the oil / grease off, then its either the aforementioned scrubby pad, which still works, but hurts significantly less when worn, or nailbrush but always with a proper hand cleaner. I keep a 5 litre bottle of hand cleaner with the hand pump nozzle thing in the bathroom in the cupboard under the sink. My favourite stuff is the AutoSmart hand cleaner, "Extra Hands" it is a little pricier than a lot of the other brands, but it is craxy good, even effective against paint. My second choice is the loctite orange handcleaner, it has orange / citrus stuff in it, so is a pretty good degreaser, but not as effective against paint. And swarfega, although being the eponymous brand for all industrial hand cleaners, is IMHO rubbish, don't waste your money on it, oh that reminds me.... #storytime
(Quick eminder that I work offshore on oil rigs and or vessels)
I remember one rig I was on for about a year, on which we were given swarfega green (without bits), which was absolutely ****ing useless as a hand cleaner. It had no particulates in it for scrubbing action, and it seemed to be imiscible with the oil, while simultaneously being hydrophobic and refusing to interact with wet dirt on our skin. The only way we could make it work in any shapr form or fashion was by grabbing sachets of sugar from the teashack, and mixing that in to the swarfega as an aggregate to scrub our hands. You do not want to imagine the mess created by a twenty odd person drill crew, who had worked a 12 hour shift, hurredly splashing about with the frustratingly futile swarfega and sachets of sugar, trying to scrub the oil based "mud" (drilling fluid) and general grease off their hands as quick as possible, so they could get in to the galley and get fed before the galley closed...
