Perceptual and conceptual evaluations made during the process of new faces becoming familiar faces are important determinants of face recognition performance. The literature shows that evaluated conceptually are better remembered compared to those evaluated perceptually. However, it has not been sufficiently considered before that faces are special stimuli. One of the most fundamental findings regarding face perception is that faces are processed holistically unlike other visual stimuli. This study examines the effects of perceptual and conceptual evaluations made during the learning of faces on face recognition performance from a holistic processing perspective. In the learning phase, participants were asked to evaluate half of the faces based on conceptual (trustworthiness) and the other half based on perceptual (face roundness) characteristics (Experiment 1). In the recognition test, an inversion manipulation was applied to examine whether the expected effect related to the type of evaluation originated from holistic processing. In Experiment 2, perceptual and conceptual evaluations were compared among themselves regarding the use of holistic processing strategies, so conceptual (trustworthiness, dominance) and perceptual (face roundness, mouth width) evaluations were diversified. Results replicated the finding that conceptual evaluations lead to better recognition performance than perceptual evaluations. Importantly, the inversion effect was greater for conceptually evaluated faces than for perceptually, suggesting that the holistic processing strategy is used more during conceptual evaluations than perceptual evaluations. Furthermore, the results of Experiment 2 suggest that perceptual evaluations differ among themselves in terms of the contribution of holistic processing contrary to conceptual evaluations.