A substantial number of studies (2) have shown that physically attractive people usually receive more help than do unattractive people. These studies, however, have typically used as 'unattractive' stimuli females simply without make-up and with ungroomed hair. Few, if any, studies have made attempts to have the requester of help looking very unattractive, whereas in the present study the help requester appeared to have grey and blackened teeth as an unattractive appearance. In the present study, which took place in a busy London street, the help requester, using a microphone and tape-recorder, asked passersby for their views about television, e.g., 'What is your favorite T.V. programme?' In one experimental condition she appeared as her normal self and in the other condition she appeared, behaved, and spoke in the same way save that her teeth were very unsightly. From the studies of the effect of physical attractiveness on helping behaviour it could be hypothesized with 'teeth discolouted' the requester of help would have received less help from the randomly selected passersby in terms of whether they were prepared to talk to her and for how long. However, with regard to abnormalities of appearance prior work (1, 3) suggests that if people agreed to be interviewed, i.e., to help a stigmatized person, then they would stay longer when the help requester had a physical appearance abnormality. The present data show that, although across the two experimental conditions there was no significant difference between the number of people who agreed to stop and be interviewed, there was a significant difference in the time they took to answer the (endless) questions. The passersby (n = 80) stayed on average 40% longer when the interviewer had unsightly teeth, and this can be taken as support for the notion (3) that, when a stigmatized person requests help and people do agree to help, they will help with greater strength than if the requester has a 'normal' appearance.