Jacques Cavallier Belletrud was born in 1962 in Grasse, France, into a family of perfumers that traces its roots in the town back generations, with both his father and grandfather working the trade before him. He began learning the vocabulary of raw materials as a child and was already composing his own formulas as a teenager, later studying languages at the University of Nice before formally entering the industry.

His career took him through Charabot and Quest International before he joined Firmenich in 1990, where he spent more than two decades and rose to become one of the house's most celebrated in-house perfumers. It was during this period that he built his reputation on marine, aquatic accords built around the synthetic Calone, most famously in Issey Miyake's L'Eau d'Issey and Giorgio Armani's Acqua di Gio, two fragrances that helped define 1990s perfumery and remain among the best-selling scents ever made. Across his Firmenich years he also worked on releases for Christian Dior, Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent, Calvin Klein, Nina Ricci and Bvlgari, for whom he composed fragrances for close to thirty years.

In 2012 he left Firmenich to become the dedicated in-house perfumer for Louis Vuitton, tasked with building the house's fine fragrance collection from scratch, starting with its first Les Parfums line released in 2016. In that role he has continued to draw on the same technical fluency with naturals and aquatic-tinged compositions that marked his earlier work, while also using Louis Vuitton's Grasse workshop to source rare raw materials. His decades of output, credited across more than eighty fragrances industry-wide, earned him the Prix François Coty in 2004 and the Fragrance Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Perfumer award in 2024.