Beauty Standards in Heian Japan, 794 - 1185 CE

Beauty Standards in Heian Japan, 794 - 1185 CE Different cultures have varied standards of female beauty. Some societies prefer women with stretched lower lips, or facial tattoos, or brass rings around their elongated necks. In Heian-era Japan, a beautiful woman had to have incredibly long hair, layer after layer of silk robes, and an intriguing make-up routine. Heian Era Hair The women of the imperial court in Heian Japan grew their hair as long as possible. They wore it straight down their backs, a shining sheet of black tresses (called kurokami). This fashion began as a reaction against imported Chinese fashions, which were much shorter and included ponytails or buns. The record-holder among Heian hair-growers, according to tradition, was a woman with hair 7 meters (23 feet) long! Beautiful Faces and Makeup The typical Heian beauty was required to have a pouty mouth, narrow eyes, a thin nose, and round apple-cheeks. Women used a heavy rice powder to paint their faces and necks white. They also drew bright red rose-bud lips on over their natural lip-lines. In a fashion that looks very odd to modern sensibilities, Japanese aristocratic women of this era shaved off their eyebrows. Then, they painted on misty new eyebrows high on their foreheads, almost at the hair-line. They achieved this effect by dipping their thumbs into black powder  and then smudging them onto their foreheads. This is known as butterfly eyebrows. Another feature that seems unattractive now was the fashion for blackened teeth. Because they used to whiten their skin, natural teeth ended up looking yellow in comparison. Therefore, Heian women painted their teeth black. Blackened teeth were supposed to be more attractive than yellow ones, and they also matched the womens black hair. Piles of Silk The final aspect of a Heian-era beautys preparations consisted of piling on the silk robes. This style of dress is called ni-hito, or twelve layers, but some upper-class women wore as many as forty layers of unlined silk. The layer closest to the skin was usually white, sometimes red. This garment was an ankle-length robe called the kosode; it was only visible at the neckline. Next was the nagabakama, a split skirt that tied at the waist and resembled a pair of red pants. Formal nagabakama could include a train more than a foot long. The first layer that was readily visible was the hitoe, a plain-colored robe. Over that, women layered between 10 and 40 beautifully patterned uchigi (robes), many of which were adorned with brocade or painted nature scenes. The top layer was called the uwagi, and it was made of the smoothest, finest silk. It often had elaborate decorations woven or painted into it. One final piece of silk completed the outfit for the highest ranks or for the most formal occasions; a sort of apron worn at the rear called a mo. It must have taken hours for these noble women to get ready to be seen in court each day. Pity their attendants, who did their own simplified version of the same routine first, and then helped their ladies with all of the necessary preparations of a Heian-era Japanese beauty. Source: Source on silks: Sara M. Harvey, The Juni-hito of Heian Japan.

Injection attacks Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Injection attacks - Research Paper Example This SQL injection would fool the database to be a regular user query and then easily access the system. The attacker spoofs identity; become the database server’s administrator; and exposes, makes unavailable or destroys existing data. a. SQL manipulation - This involves the modification of the SQL query through the alteration of the WHERE clause (Patel et al., 2011). This modification would cause an amendment of the statement’s WHERE clause so that it constantly returns TRUE. b. Code injection – New SQL statements, instead of valid input, would be introduced into the input fields. The classic statement or code would then append a SQL Server command, making SQL statement vulnerable. Patel et al. (2011) argues that code injection only works through the support of request of various SQL statements per database or support of keywords like OR and AND by the database. c. Function call injection involves user defined functions or database functions being added into vulnerable SQL queries. Patel et al. (2011) observe that these function calls could be applied in the making of internal calls or modification of data in the database that could be harmful to users. Certain characters should be the only ones accepted in the input areas. The length of these fields should be limited (Patel et al., 2011). For example, for usernames and passwords, only numbers and alphabets should be accepted and the field limited to 15 characters. This involves the alteration of application flow through overwriting of memory parts (Cowan, Wagle & Pu, 2000). This aims at subverting the operation of a privileged program for the attacker to take control of the program so as to control the host. In this case, the attacker exploits websites so as to inject data into the given application so as to execute XPath queries (Shanmughaneethi, Ravichandran & Swamynathan, 2011). XPath refers to a query language which describes the way of locating