In this study, we present a novel geometric representation for 3D faces in order to enhance distinctiveness of generally smooth range images. This novel face representation is based on Multi-Scale Extended Local Binary Patterns (ELBP) and enables accurate and fast description of local shape variations on range faces. When associated with the proposed SIFT-based local feature matching scheme, this novel geometric facial representation shows its discriminative power in 3D face recognition, displaying a rank-one recognition rate up to 97.2% and a verification rate of 98.4% at a 0.001 FAR respectively on the FRGC v2.0 database. Moreover, costly registration is not needed thanks to the relative tolerance of the proposed representation and the SIFT methodology to moderate pose changes as the ones existing in FRGC v2.0. Finally, additional experiments demonstrate that the entire system is also robust to facial expression variations.