Face alignment aims to fit a deformable landmark-based mesh to a facial image so that all facial features can be located accurately. In discriminative face alignment, an alignment score function, which is treated as the appearance model, is learned such that moving along its gradient direction can improve the alignment. This paper proposes a new face model named “Optimal Gradient Pursuit Model”, where the objective is to minimize the angle between the gradient direction and the vector pointing toward the ground-truth shape parameter. We formulate an iterative approach to solve this minimization problem. With extensive experiments in generic face alignment, we show that our model improves the alignment accuracy and speed compared to the state-of-the-art discriminative face alignment approach.