While saliency detection for 3D meshes has been extensively studied in the past decades, only a little work considers color information, and most of existing 3D mesh saliency databases are collected using meshes without color information. The lack of publicly available 3D colored mesh saliency database hinders the research progress in 3D colored mesh saliency detection. In this article, we established a novel 3D colored mesh saliency database (3DCMS) based on an eye-tracking experiment and investigated subjects’ visual attention behavior towards 3D colored meshes. Based on the investigations, a novel 3D colored mesh saliency detection framework is proposed which takes both color and geometric features into consideration. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, we compare it with several relevant methods and apply it to 3D mesh simplification task. The quantitative and qualitative evaluation results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed framework. The proposed 3DCMS database will be made publicly available.