Fr. Scott‑Vincent Borba, co‑founder of e.l.f. Cosmetics and now a Catholic priest, has described a terrifying spiritual encounter with St. Michael the Archangel that he says changed the course of his life, in a recent appearance on Matt Fradd’s podcast Pints with Aquinas.
Former beauty mogul recounts vision of hell
Borba told Fradd that the experience occurred during a party at his home, at a time when he was immersed in a different kind of lifestyle. “I was partying,” he said. “I looked around like, why am I not happy?” In that moment of interior questioning, he said, “all of a sudden, in a mystical way, the entire ceiling of my house kind of disappeared.”
Into his field of vision, he recounted, came a towering figure.
“What I saw come into my peripheral view is St. Michael the Archangel,” Borba said, describing the angel as “about two stories tall, the most beautiful creature you could ever put your eyes on.”
Time itself seemed to halt around him. “He suspended time,” Borba recalled. “It felt like everything else around me stopped, but I was still functioning.”
In that suspended moment, Borba says the archangel granted him an interior grace: “He then gave me the grace of looking at my soul. It was kind of like an illumination of conscience.”
According to Borba, St. Michael showed him not only the state of his soul but its eternal trajectory: “He showed me where I was at, in hell. I already had a position and place in hell.”
Borba described seeing “all the demons that were around me that were ready to chomp on the bit when I would arrive,” along with souls already suffering there. He said those souls were “tormented by the pleasures of the world that they loved,” explaining that “whatever perverse pleasures or deficiencies that they had were the same torments that were used on them for eternity.”
The imagery, he said, was deeply disturbing: “Animal heads and bodies of humans. And it was horrific. I should have died based on the horror that I saw.”
“It exorcized the entire house”
The encounter did not end with the vision of hell. Borba said St. Michael then acted to cleanse the spiritual atmosphere around him.
“He then took his wings, then raised them out, which for a two story tall angel, his wingspan was the size of a football field,” he told Fradd.
With minimal movement, Borba said, the archangel’s wings drove out demonic forces from his home.
“When he used the tips of his wings, he just barely moved them. It exorcized the entire house,” Borba recalled. “All the amount of demons, just like a tornado came in and just went out and up and the whole place, I could sense and feel its light and peace return.”
“He then allowed me to see,” Borba added, suggesting that the encounter continued to unfold interiorly, shaping his understanding of his life and vocation.
From cosmetics to the priesthood
Borba’s account of this experience forms part of a wider conversion story that has drawn national attention as he left behind a lucrative career in the beauty industry to pursue the Catholic priesthood.
On Pints with Aquinas, he situates the vision of St. Michael within a journey away from what he has called a “spiritual low point” toward a life he now describes as one of “happiness, joy, purpose, and fulfillment” in service to Christ and the Church.