With the collapse of the Roman Empire, soap went out of fashion---with century after century of malodorous Europeans as a consequence! It was only around the beginning of the first Millennium that the Celts reintroduced bathing soap in England. Olive-oil soap was reintroduced into Spain and France during the late Middle Ages, becoming famous under the names 'Jabón de Castilla' and 'Savon de Marseille'. For centuries, that classic, natural olive-oil soap would remain the 'gold standard' for soap production.
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Since the dawn of our civilisation, the peoples around the Mediterranean Sea have attributed remarkable healing properties to olive oil. Already in the Egypt of the Pharaohs, people were using soap to care for their skin, while the ancient Greeks even bathed in pure olive oil! In the Roman Empire, people used olive-oil soap to wash textiles, and later also for bathing---scented with rose petals, laurel and other herbs. 
In the twentieth century, soap making was annexed by the detergent industry. Industrial producers replaced olive oil with much cheaper oils such as cottonseed oil and linseed oil, often mixed with tallow (rendered beef fat) and fish oil. To hasten the production process, chemicals were added. These days, a bar of commercial soap contains at least twenty different chemical ingredients---including artificial colouring agents and synthetic (often obtrusive) aromatic substances. The packaging may mention or depict olive oil as being one of the ingredients, but you are rarely ever informed that it concerns a very minute amount, added for no other reason than for advertising purposes. 
