Makeup isn't always something frivolous
https://fransorin.com/one-small-act-kindness-saved-lives-impact-giving-lipsticks-women-brink-death/
When British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on April 15, 1945, they encountered 40,000 prisoners in 200 huts. They also discovered 10,000 bodies. The vast majority had died from typhus or starvation. The German guards, fearing infection, had refused to bury them, and the remaining skeletal prisoners lacked the strength to do so, so the bodies had been dumped in piles around the camp and left to rot.
The British soldiers were shocked beyond belief. They began to retch when they reached the wire, overcome by the stench of death. These hardened troops, who had fought the Nazis all cross Europe, cried like babies. But they went to work, bulldozing the corpses into a mass grace. Somewhere among them was young Anne Frank, who had recorded in her Amsterdam diary as early as 1942 that Jews were being abducted and gassed.
By April 28 everyone had been buried. Although 500 inmates continued to die every day, at least there were no more corpses lying about, which resulted in a boost in morale. Food was available, and nearly all the inmates had been deloused with DDT powder, their clothes fumigated, their bodies scrubber clean. Infected huts were being incinerated with flamethrowers.
Nicholas Best (who provided the above description) in his book, Five Days That Shook The World, described what happened next.
“Some genius had introduced lipstick to the camp. A large consignment had just arrived, enough for every woman at Belsen to paint her lips if she wished. Huge numbers did so, happily recalling that they had once been feminine and might be so again one day. Lipstick had turned out to be an enormous morale booster, making all the difference between life and death for some of the women in the camp.”
British Lieutenant Colonel Mervin W. Gonin, commander of the 11th Light Field Ambulance, R.A.M.C. was among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945. In his diary, he gave a more graphic description of the effect of the lipstick:
“It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don’t know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering around about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on their arm. At last they could taken an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.”