How old are the olive soaps when your wife used them? I personally find that my castile can be drying before the 3 month mark. When I tested at 4 months, it was much better.
I was curious about that also because olive oil soaps get better with age ~ 6 months to a year of curing is best. I hate that long cure time but it really helps. My first 2 soaps were olive oil soaps, one with green tea and the other with activated charcoal to see if there would be any difference between those 2 ingredients. At first, after a 3 month cure, they both felt overly drying to my skin and I almost threw it all out, but I grated up all the charcoal soap and most of the green tea soap, leaving a few bars to cure longer. In the meantime, I experimented with new recipes and did more research and low and behold those green tea bars felt a lot better a year later ~ I was rather surprised.
I will add that I use only EVOO, that recipe had goat's milk as the liquid in the lye solution, the green tea was tea bags, opened and added to the EVOO as it warmed so it was thoroughly infused and I left the tea bits in (next time I will strain them out, since they really aren't very pretty).
I watched a lot of YouTube videos about olive oil soaps and about Aleppo soaps (which I also like), and they all say the same thing ~ long cure times are best. I know it seems like olive oil soaps should be easy since it's primarily one oil, but it's a tricky oil ~ you will either have to figure out a way to make it work for you or find a different oil or recipe that performs the way you need it to.
Good luck and happy soaping!
ETA: I forgot to mention, mine doesn't have an oily smell ~ they just smell soapy. IMO, I'm leaning towards it being a higher super fat, but possibly the type of oil you used. I used a 5% SF in my recipe and it didn't smell oily, so I can't imagine 3% more making that much of a difference
