An appearance inspection apparatus comprising: a first illuminating means for casting a slit light having an intermediate wavelength of three types of lights having different wavelengths from each other on a surface of a sample under inspection; a first imaging means for acquiring reflected luminance data on the surface of the sample by receiving reflected light of the slit light; a second illuminating means (41A, 41B) for casting two lights of different wavelengths other than the intermediate wavelength on a position other than a position illuminated by the slit light on the sample surface from two different directions so as to overlap the two lights with each other; a second imaging means for acquiring surface data on the sample surface by receiving reflected light from the position where the two lights are overlapped with each other; a shape inspecting means which includes a plane data generating unit which generates green-component images from the reflected luminance data; a color component separating means that separates a 2D surface image of the surface captured by the second imaging means into a red component and a blue component, thereby creating a red-component image and a blue-component image; an unevenness defect detecting means for detecting presence or absence of surface unevenness from a ratio between intensities of the two lights contained in the surface data; an extraneous color defect detecting means for detecting changes in color tone on the sample surface by normalizing the green-component image captured by the first imaging means, the red-component image and the blue-component image created by the color component separating means and synthesizing the normalized green-component image, red-component image, and blue-component image into a 2D color image; and a gloss defect detecting means for detecting gloss on the sample surface based on the presence or absence of surface unevenness and the changes in color tone. a first illuminating means for casting a slit light having an intermediate wavelength of three types of lights having different wavelengths from each other on a surface of a sample under inspection; a first imaging means for acquiring reflected luminance data on the surface of the sample by receiving reflected light of the slit light; a second illuminating means (41A, 41B) for casting two lights of different wavelengths other than the intermediate wavelength on a position other than a position illuminated by the slit light on the sample surface from two different directions so as to overlap the two lights with each other; a second imaging means for acquiring surface data on the sample surface by receiving reflected light from the position where the two lights are overlapped with each other; a shape inspecting means which includes a plane data generating unit which generates green-component images from the reflected luminance data; a color component separating means that separates a 2D surface image of the surface captured by the second imaging means into a red component and a blue component, thereby creating a red-component image and a blue-component image; an unevenness defect detecting means for detecting presence or absence of surface unevenness from a ratio between intensities of the two lights contained in the surface data; an extraneous color defect detecting means for detecting changes in color tone on the sample surface by normalizing the green-component image captured by the first imaging means, the red-component image and the blue-component image created by the color component separating means and synthesizing the normalized green-component image, red-component image, and blue-component image into a 2D color image; and a gloss defect detecting means for detecting gloss on the sample surface based on the presence or absence of surface unevenness and the changes in color tone.