In this article, the authors present an orientation-preserving spectral correspondence for three-dimensional (3D) shape analysis, which is robust and efficient for topological and deformable changes, even for non-isometric shapes. Our technique introduces an optimal spectral representation by combining the eigendecomposition with principal components analysis (PCA) to the heat kernel Laplacian matrix, and we further propose an efficient symmetry detection method based on so-called dominant eigenfunctions. Finally, a 3D descriptor encoding intrinsic symmetry structure and local geometric feature is constructed which effectively reveals the consistent structure between the deformable shapes. Consequently, sufficient orientation-preserving correspondence can be established in our embedding space. Experimental results showed that our method produces stable matching results in comparison with state-of-the-art methods.