Face Recognition is a computer application that is capable of detecting, tracking, identifying or verifying human faces from an image or video captured using a digital camera. Although lot of progress has been made in domain of face detection and recognition for security, identification and surveillance purpose, but still there are issues hindering the progress to reach or surpass human level accuracy. These issues are variations in human facial appearance such as; varying lighting condition, noise in face images, scale, pose etc. Kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) as a powerful nonlinear feature extraction method has proven as a preprocessing step for classification algorithm. A face recognition approach based on KPCA and genetic algorithms (GAs) is proposed. By the use of the polynomial functions as a kernel function in KPCA, the high order relationships can be utilized and the nonlinear principal components can be obtained. After that nonlinear principal components, we use GAs to select the optimal feature set for classification.