One possible solution for pose- and illuminationinvariant face recognition is to employ appearancebased approaches, which rely greatly on correct facial textures. However, existing facial texture analysis algorithms are suboptimal, because they usually neglect specular reflections and require numerous training images for virtual view synthesis. This paper presents a novel texture synthesis approach from a single frontal view for face recognition. Using a generic 3D face shape, facial textures are analyzed with consideration of all of the ambient, diffuse, and specular reflections. Virtual views are synthesized under different poses and illuminations. The proposed approach was evaluated using the CMU-PIE face database. Encouraging results show that the proposed approach improves face recognition performances across pose and illumination variations.