Roland Barthes and Semiotics

Roland Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician

He found semiotics, the study of signs, useful in these interrogations. Barthes explained that these bourgeois cultural myths were "second-order signs," or "connotations." for example a picture of a full, dark bottle is a signifier that relates to a specific signified: a fermented, alcoholic beverage.

for example here is a selection of colours and their interpretations through semiotics