Jacques Polge was born on 14 June 1943 in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, in the Vaucluse near Avignon, a region whose jasmine-scented air he later credited with drawing him toward perfumery. After completing a degree in English literature at Aix-Marseille University, he set that path aside for a hands-on apprenticeship in Grasse, training under the influential perfumer and teacher Jean Carles at the composition house Roure Bertrand Dupont.

Polge began working professionally in perfumery around 1970, contributing to fragrances released under Roure's client relationships during the following decade, including work associated with Yves Saint Laurent's Rive Gauche and Emanuel Ungaro's early feminine releases. This period established him within the tight circle of Grasse-trained noses who moved between independent composition houses and the big fashion maisons.

In 1978, Chanel appointed Polge as its in-house perfumer, succeeding Henri Robert as only the third person to hold that role after founding perfumer Ernest Beaux. Over the following thirty-seven years he became one of the most consequential noses of the modern perfume industry, composing or co-composing a run of commercially defining Chanel releases — Antaeus, Coco, Égoïste, Allure, Coco Mademoiselle, Chance, and Bleu de Chanel among them — while also revisiting the house's own history, reworking N°5 into the fuller Eau de Parfum and later into Eau Première.

Polge retired from Chanel in 2015 and was succeeded by his son, Olivier Polge, who had joined the house's perfumery team in 2013 — a rare father-to-son handover of an in-house perfumer chair. His contribution to French perfumery was recognized with France's Ordre national du Mérite, and his three-plus decades at Chanel are generally regarded as having shaped the modern template for what a large fashion house's signature-scent program looks like.