Growing up in a farming community in California’s Central Valley as the youngest of five brothers, Scott Vincent Borba felt he was destined for something great.
“I always wanted to be something bigger,” he said. In college, when I saw students driving an Alfa Romeo or Porsche, I also wanted to have a luxury car.
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He eventually helped create elf cosmetics, which grew into a $3 billion company selling shine-restoring lip oil, cleansing balm that removes makeup and other products at Target, Walgreens and Walmart.
He created his own brand, Borba, which produced flavored water and gummies that promised to purify and revitalize the skin. He wrote two books about skin care and even recorded a song called “Skin Deep”.
But despite his apparent success, he said he was unhappy. One night about 12 years ago, during a party at his newly renovated house in the Hollywood Hills, with his Aston Martin convertible parked outside, he looked around and began to question everything.
“What is the meaning of life?” he recalled thinking in an interview. “Is it just making money and partying and doing it all over again, trying to accumulate things, and then die? And I thought, ‘Is this what we were created for? Is this why I’m here?'”
These questions led Borba, now 52 years old, on an extraordinary journey, which will conclude this Saturday (23), when he will be ordained a priest of the Catholic Church in the Diocese of Fresno, California.
Along the way, he had to face the weight of his previous life as a high-ranking executive in the beauty industry.
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“Living a life where I led everyone to vanity, trying to turn people into little Kardashians, offering products to make them look and feel part of the celebrity universe, is the opposite of what God wants,” said Borba. He added: “It’s something I will have to live with in penance for the rest of my life, knowing how I impacted the world in this way.”
Borba said he found true fulfillment in his new life serving God. He said he gave up his possessions — his house, his Aston Martin, his Dolce & Gabbana coats, his Gucci and Ralph Lauren suits, in addition to getting rid of his stock investments and his retirement account.
The transition from the beauty industry to the clergy was not easy. In his first meeting with a vocations director — a priest who helps Catholics discern their vocation — Borba said he showed up wearing a Hugo Boss suit, driving a Mercedes and ready to make his “introduction.”
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“’My God, we have a lot of work ahead of us,’” Borba recalled of the priest’s words.
Borba was raised in a Catholic family in Visalia, California. As a child, he said he sold candy to friends “for a high profit margin,” and his father encouraged his entrepreneurial spirit.
She graduated from Santa Clara University, a Jesuit institution in the San Francisco Bay area, and in 2004 helped create elf — an acronym for “eyes, lips and face” — as an accessible brand, after noticing women with luxury cars buying beauty products in popular stores in Los Angeles.
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“I said, ‘This is the opportunity,’” he recalled.
As the brand — now called ELF Beauty — grew rapidly, Borba launched Borba Skin Balancing Water, enriched with what he called “microcrystals” of vitamins, minerals and fruit extracts that promised to correct skin imperfections.
Sephora sold drinks in refrigerators under signs reading “Skincare for drinking”, and actress Maggie Gyllenhaal was even photographed holding a bottle. In 2007, he reached a deal with Anheuser-Busch to market and distribute the drinks.
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For the 2011 Golden Globes, he said he gave actress Mila Kunis a $7,000 facial using crushed rubies and diamonds.
Parallel to his intense work, Borba also led a life of parties — until the night at his home when he had a “mystical experience”, feeling the presence of God and Saint Michael the Archangel, and was shocked to see himself from a new perspective.
“I should have died from the horror of what I saw, considering how my life was,” he said.
Borba kicked everyone out of the party, went to a hotel and burst into tears. He moved out of his house and never returned.
“I remember saying to myself, crying, ‘This is not the man my father and mother raised me to be,’” Borba said. “’This is not the man God created him to be.’”
After a period of searching, he said he answered a call to the priesthood that he had first felt at age 10.
In 2019, he entered a seminary in Oregon and then entered St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park, California. According to him, some seminarians thought he was “a joke” because of his history in the cosmetics sector.
Bishop Joseph V. Brennan, bishop of Fresno, said that when he first met Borba about seven years ago, he had no idea of her experience with cosmetics.
“I had never heard of the elf,” Brennan said in an interview. “Honestly, that wasn’t part of my experience or my world.”
But, according to him, Borba clearly went through “a transformative experience in relation to faith” and overcame some initial challenges as a seminarian. After five years of studies, he completed his training at the São Patrício Seminary this month.
“His maturity, his business acumen and his experience had a lot to do with it,” Brennan said.
This Saturday, when he is ordained a priest, the Diocese of Fresno will announce where Borba will serve as a reverend.
He said he looks forward to mentoring parishioners, celebrating the sacraments and serving God, who “truly makes us beautiful — beautifies us from the inside out.”
“In all my success, in all the opportunities I’ve had in life, and in all the financial gains I’ve accumulated, I’ve never been happier,” she said.
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