‘I should have been dead’: He co-founded a $4.2b empire but has given it up to become a priest

Growing up in a farming community in California’s Central Valley as the youngest of five children, Scott Vincent Borba felt he was destined for more.

“I always wanted to be something bigger,” he said. In college, when he saw students driving Alfa Romeos and Porsches, he wanted a fancy car too.

He went on to help start e.l.f. cosmetics, which has grown into a $US3 billion ($4.2 billion) company selling glow-reviving lip oil, makeup-melting cleansing balm and other products at Target, Walgreens and Walmart. He started his own brand, Borba, which made flavoured water and gummy candies that promised to clarify and replenish the skin. He wrote two books about skin care and even recorded a song called Skin Deep.

But despite his outward success, he said, he was miserable. One night about 12 years ago, at a party at his newly renovated house in the Hollywood Hills, with his prized Aston Martin convertible parked outside, he looked around and questioned everything.

“What is life all about?” he recalled thinking in an interview. “Is it just about making money and partying and repeating, just trying to acquire, and then we die? And I said: ‘That’s why we’re created? That’s why I’m here?’”

Those questions led Borba, 52, on a remarkable journey, which he will complete on Saturday (US time), when he is ordained as a Catholic priest in the Diocese of Fresno, California.

Along the way, he has had to grapple with his old life as a high-flying beauty executive.

“Living a life that I brought everyone to vanity, trying to make little mini-Kardashians out of everyone, bringing them the products to make them look and feel like they’re part of the celebrity society, is the opposite of what God wants,” Borba said. He added, “It’s something that I’m going to have to live with penance throughout the rest of my life to know how I’ve affected the world in this one way.”

Borba said he was truly fulfilled in his new life serving God. He said he had given up his possessions – his house, his Aston Martin, his Dolce & Gabbana coats and his suits by Gucci and Ralph Lauren, and has divested from his stocks.

It was not an easy transition from the beauty industry to the clergy. At his first meeting with a vocations director, a priest who helps Catholics discern their calling, Borba said he showed up in a Hugo Boss suit, driving a Mercedes, ready to deliver his “pitch”.

“‘Oh my gosh, we have so much work to do,’” Borba recalled the priest telling him.

Borba was raised in a Catholic family in Visalia, California. As a boy, he said, he sold candy to his friends “at a high margin”, and his father encouraged his entrepreneurial spirit. He graduated from Santa Clara University, a Jesuit institution in the Bay Area, and in 2004, he helped to start e.l.f. – short for “eyes, lips and face” – as a budget-friendly brand after seeing women with luxury cars shopping for beauty products at dollar-stores around Los Angeles.

“I said, ‘That’s the opportunity’,” he recalled.

As the brand, now called E.L.F. Beauty, took off, Borba started Borba Skin Balancing Water, infused with what he called “crystallines” of vitamins, minerals and fruit extracts that promised to correct skin imperfections. Sephora sold them in refrigerators under signs marked “Drinkable Skincare”, and actress Maggie Gyllenhaal was photographed holding a bottle. In 2007, he inked a deal with Anheuser-Busch to market and distribute the drinks. For the 2011 Golden Globe Awards, he said, he gave actress Mila Kunis a $US7000 facial using crushed rubies and diamonds.

Alongside his hard work, Borba was also partying – until the party at his house where he had a “mystical experience” as he felt God and the presence of St Michael the Archangel, and was shocked to see himself in a new light.

‘Living a life that I brought everyone to vanity, trying to make little mini-Kardashians out of everyone, bringing them the products to make them look and feel like they’re part of the celebrity society, is the opposite of what God wants.’

Scott Borba

“I should have been dead from the horror of what I saw, and based on where my life was,” he said.

Borba kicked everyone out of the party, checked into a hotel and collapsed in tears. He moved out of his house and never returned. The house, he said, “felt like a sin den for me”.

“I remember saying to myself, remember crying: ‘This is not the man my dad and mother created me to be,’” Borba said. “‘This is not the man that God created me to be.’”

After a period of searching, he said, he found himself answering a call to the priesthood that he had first felt when he was 10 years old.

In 2019, he joined a seminary in Oregon and then entered St Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park, California. Some of the seminarians “thought I was a joke”, he said, because of his background in cosmetics.

The Most Reverend Joseph V. Brennan, the bishop of Fresno, said that when he first met Borba about seven years ago, he had no idea about his experience in cosmetics. “I’d never heard of e.l.f. before,” Brennan said in an interview. “Honestly, not part of my experience or part of my world.”

But Borba, he said, had clearly had “a life-changing experience in terms of his faith”, and overcame some early challenges as a seminarian. After five years of study, he graduated from St Patrick’s this month.

“His maturity and his business acumen and experience had a lot to do with that,” Brennan said.

On Saturday, when he is ordained as a priest, the Fresno Diocese will announce where Borba will serve as Reverend Borba. Borba said he was looking forward to counselling parishioners, celebrating the sacraments and serving God, who “actually beautifies us – beautifies us from the inside out”.

“In all of my success, and all of my opportunities in life, and all of the monetary gains I’ve had in my life, I have never been more happy,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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