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 we obtain the nonlinear principal components, we use GAs to select the optimal feature set for classification. At the recognition stage, we employed linear support vector machines (SVM) as classifier for the recognition tasks. Two face databases were used to test our algorithm and higher recognition rates were obtained which show that our algorithm is effective.