You'll have to forgive me for not being an experienced soaper, which is to say I've only made a few batches and it was years ago! But the two most common reasons for soap feeling that way are that it's either not cured long enough, or the amounts may not have been weighed carefully enough (e.g. the saponification numbers didn't add up which might mean there was too much lye in the soap?). So how fresh was your soap, and did you weigh everything out carefully and use one of the online
soap calculators (or are you very good at math and understand the formula if you didn't use a soap calc)? Just trying to help - not sure but these seem to be the main reasons from what I've read.
Now if you know for certain that you've done everything right, the next 2 possibilities are that you followed someone else's recipe who didn't get it down perfectly OR you - like me - just prefer a much more conditioning soap.
If that's the case you would want to superfat your soap (use a lye discount).
I haven't looked you up to see if you've shared info about yourself/your experience so I don't know if I'm stating the obvious here, but in case you don't know or remember the following details (I forget so much when it's been a while!), to superfat your soap, you want to add a little extra oil or butter to your pot that won't be given the opportunity to saponify as the other oils/fats do, with the lye - in other words it won't actually become soap, but will still be part of the soap...so you'll get extra conditioning built into your soap.
I'm probably over-thinking things at this point, but what's NOT clear to me - what I don't remember - is whether this is actually extra oil/butter in addition to the main recipe, or if it's part of it (if that makes sense). I also don't know if the following matters:
- if there's a certain type of oil or butter this should be (can you use any oil or butter to be your super-fatting agent, as long as it's mild?)
- whether you put that super-fatting oil/butter in at the same time as the rest of them, or whether it's necessary to put in this oil/butter a bit later, like at light trace. I've read you can add it at light trace, just after the lye water's already had time to react with the oils and saponification has already happened thus the newly-added oil/butter can't turn into soap... but I don't know if that's necessary or not, to have to wait so long.
I'll probably start another thread asking about that if googling or searching doesn't give me a clear answer, cause I'd like to have all my ducks in a row before I make my first batch in years!
I hope that was helpful and i'm sorry if you already knew all that!!