This paper presents a 3D approach for recognizing faces based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The approach addresses the issue of proper 3D face alignment required by PCA for maximum data compression and good generalization performance for new untrained faces. This issue has traditionally been addressed by 2D data normalization, a step that eliminates 3D object size information important for the recognition process. We achieve correspondence of facial points by registering a 3D face to a scaled generic 3D reference face and subsequently perform a surface normal search algorithm. 3D scaling of the generic reference face is performed to enable better alignment of facial points while preserving important 3D size information in the input face. The benefits of this approach for 3D face recognition and dimensionality reduction have been demonstrated on components of the Face Recognition Grand Challenge (FRGC) database versions 1 and 2.