I don't believe that Illyrians, Thracians, Sarmatians and Germans were truly red haired. We know Greeks and Romans didn't have a concept of brown hair, so maybe by red they meant what we now call medium brown hair? It indeed looks somewhat reddish.

>>17787717 (OP)
The Kalogera sisters are ethnic greeks and they have redder hair than this

It's unlikely. I think most of them were probably brown haired, but for the Greeks this color looked reddish.
Red hair is a rare mutation, it's pretty much impossible for entire ethnic groups to be red headed.

>>17787750
Chestnut hair can sometimes appear to have a reddish tint

>>17787750
This is what I said yes.
It seems:

melanos = black and dark brown
pyrrhos = medium brown and auburn
xanthos = light brown, red, blond
polios/leukos = gray, maybe platinum blond

kuanochaita and khrusokomas were either poetic synonyms of melanos and xanthos respectively or extremes of these colors.

>>17787750
Do we how long different peoples wore their hair in antiquity? A longer hair can have get all sorts of shades, especially if exposed to the sun.

>>17787717 (OP)
>lust provoking image
>irrelevant time-wasting question

>>17787717 (OP)
Yes, this is the obvious takeaway. In extreme swarthoid places there exist more redheads than blondes even, so it makes sense they'd have a concept for it and then apply that to the next closest thing they see.

>>17787717 (OP)
Maybe light brown that can look slightly reddish/orange under strong sunlight, the colour you posted is too dark, I doubt it would have made such an impression

>>17788669
Since most most Greeks had hair close to black, that color is noticeable.

>>17788751
Proof for that? I doubt that most ancient Greeks had hair colour similar to South/East Asians, when modern Greeks, other Southern Europeans, and even Turks, Jews, Levantines have mostly dark brown hair rather than jet-black

>>17787717 (OP)
>I don't believe that Illyrians, Thracians, Sarmatians and Germans were truly red haired.
I think the skepticism the account of Xenophanes has received is unwarranted, the one where he implied Thracians were red-haired and blue-eyed. I'll explain why. Try to be patient because the answer isn't Nordicism.

In a very literal sense, πυρρός means flame-colored. This is because the word for fire is πῦρ. So in other words, this interpretation of the language is straightforward. It involves no mental gymnastics even if the word could have alternative meanings.
https://logeion.uchicago.edu/%CF%80%CF%85%CF%81%CF%81%CF%8C%CF%82

Where are we going wrong then? By thinking these descriptions are anything more than an exaggerated stereotype. For comparison, the red hair frequency in Ireland is a whopping 10% of the population. Yet the Irish are frequently stereotyped as red-haired. Is it a Nordicist conspiracy? Of course not. This is just a natural human tendency to stereotype based on notable unique features.

With this in mind, I would assume not even 10% of Thracians being red-haired would be necessary for Xenophanes claims. Half (5%) or a quarter (2.5%) as many is probably all it would take for outside ethnic groups to stereotype Thracians in this regard. Red hair at a low frequency isn't impossible. Remember that it even appears in the Levant.

>>17787717 (OP)
Even today nonwhites wildly exaggerate the level of blondism in Europeans. If you watched anime you would think every single white person was fair haired.

>>17788788
Dark brown hair looks close to black.
>>17788983
This fragment from Galen implies most those people had pyrrhos hair while actually they had kinda brown hair.

>>17789963
I wouldn't assume that Galen writing centuries later can provide us any insight into the language of Xenophanes.
Your Galen fragment doesn't tell us nearly enough what Galen thought about "red" (presumably πυρρός). What Galen seems to be doing is generalizing a whole swath of peoples as lighter haired by declaring them all "flame-haired". Not surprising, but if we look back at Xenophanes he was stereotyping two features: πυρρός hair and blue eyes. This sounds more like a minority than rather than brown or dark brown-haired plurality.