This paper presents an efficient method of recognition of facial expressions in a video. The works proposes highly efficient facial expression recognition system using PCA optimized by Genetic Algorithm .Reduced computational time and comparable efficiency in terms of its ability to recognize correctly are the benchmarks of this work. Video sequences contain more information than still images hence are in the research subject now-a-days and have much more activities during the expression actions. We use PCA, a statistical method to reduce the dimensionality and are used to extract features with the help of covariance analysis to generate Eigen –components of the images. The Eigen-components as a feature input is optimized by Genetic algorithm to reduce the computation cost