The Man Who Walked Away From Mirrors

In an America intoxicated by celebrity, accumulation, and the endless choreography of self-promotion, the story of Scott-Vincent Borba unfolds almost like an old parable rediscovered beneath the noise of the modern age — a narrative less about abandoning wealth than about rediscovering the soul beneath it.

This Saturday, at St. Charles Borromeo Church, Borba — co-founder of e.l.f. Beauty, the cosmetics giant now valued at approximately $3.3 billion — will be ordained a Roman Catholic priest for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Fresno by Bishop Joseph Brennan. The ordination, which will also include Marco Ayala and Jose Francisco Orozco, marks the culmination of a spiritual transformation that has quietly unfolded over more than a decade — a journey from Hollywood culture and multimillion-dollar success to seminary formation, silence, service, and prayer.

Borba’s story has already attracted national attention over the years precisely because it appears to move against the current of contemporary American mythology. Born in Visalia and raised within California’s Central Valley, he built an enormously successful career, helping launch a cosmetics empire that became one of the most recognizable beauty brands in the United States. That success opened doors into elite business circles, influence, visibility, and the polished universe of image cultivation that modern America so often mistakes for fulfillment itself.

Yet beneath the glamour and financial triumph, Borba says he experienced a profound interior collapse at the age of 40 — what he describes as an “illumination of conscience,” a sudden and painful awareness of the condition of his soul.

“I understood where my soul was in that moment, and it was not in a good place,” he recalled in recent interviews. “I knew, with God’s mercy, I was living in great sin.”

That realization would change everything.

What many people viewed as the pinnacle of success had begun to feel spiritually hollow. Borba now speaks about beauty in an entirely different vocabulary than the billion-dollar industry he once helped build.

“What came to be a great opportunity, a beauty,” he recently reflected, “I pray that the people who are using the product understand that the product of true beauty is from the inside out.”

It is perhaps the most striking irony in his story: a man who helped build a cosmetics empire eventually concluding that the deepest form of beauty cannot be purchased, marketed, branded, or reflected back through mirrors.

According to a recent interview with OSV News (that you can read in th elink below), Borba eventually left behind not only his businesses and luxury lifestyle, but also the entire ecosystem of public visibility that surrounded him. After entering formation at St. Patrick’s Seminary, he undertook what he called a “media fast,” stepping away from interviews, publicity, and even social media itself.

“I literally deleted all my accounts that week,” Borba explained of his decision to disappear from digital culture seven years ago.

For a man once immersed in branding, marketing, and image management, the renunciation carries almost biblical symbolism. Borba has described arriving at an early discernment meeting in an expensive suit and luxury vehicle, believing worldly success might somehow impress Church officials, only to discover how radically different priestly life would require him to become. He sold luxury cars, liquidated investments, donated large sums to charity, and embraced a far simpler existence.

Yet perhaps the most striking dimension of his story is not what he abandoned, but what he discovered.

In the OSV News interview, Borba spoke passionately about his growing devotion to the homeless, the elderly, the sick, and the forgotten. He described filling his car with small lunches to hand out to unhoused people throughout California’s Central Valley, explaining that every encounter becomes, for him, a search for Christ himself.

“Every single homeless person I meet, I look into their eyes and I ask for their name, and I am looking to see if they’re Jesus,” he said.

The language is deeply Franciscan in spirit, reflecting a Christianity rooted not in spectacle, but in encounter — one that sees divinity in vulnerability rather than prestige. During seminary formation, Borba ministered with the Missionaries of Charity among homeless encampments in San Francisco and worked with Visalia’s Bethlehem Center. He also speaks frequently about his desire to bring ministry into hospitals and nursing homes, those quiet places where loneliness often lingers unseen behind closed doors.

Father Ivan Hernandez Melchor recently described Borba’s witness as a powerful example of humility and service: “To see a man of wealth deny himself and be willing to serve a vocation that requires so much humility and service and generosity.”

And perhaps that explains why Borba’s story resonates far beyond Catholic circles. In an era where American culture increasingly confuses visibility with value and wealth with fulfillment, his journey suggests the opposite: that abundance without meaning can become another form of poverty, and that silence, sacrifice, mercy, and service may still possess transformative power.

For California’s deeply rooted Catholic communities — Portuguese, Latino, Filipino, and immigrant families throughout the San Joaquin Valley — the priesthood has historically represented not celebrity, but availability: the willingness to accompany communities through births, funerals, illness, migration, grief, and hope. Borba’s story, though extraordinary in its origins, ultimately reconnects with that older spiritual tradition.

On Saturday morning in Visalia, beneath ancient prayers spoken in a restless and distracted America, a former cosmetics executive from a multibillion-dollar corporation will kneel before the altar and become Father Scott-Vincent Borba — exchanging the language of markets for the language of mercy, and choosing, in an age obsessed with possession and image, the difficult freedom of surrender.

Adapted from stories in OSV News, CBS47, FOX26 and ABC30