That is the thing worth judging it on. Bone structure, eye colour, eye spacing and the shape of the nose carry over, so the older version should be recognisable to anyone who knows you. Where it slips is with heavily filtered source photos: if the original has already been smoothed and reshaped, the model is ageing an idealised face rather than yours.

Yes — put the number in the prompt. Twenty years reads as middle age, fifty gets you to a plausible seventies. Anything past about sixty years tends to converge on a generic very-old face, because the individual features that make you identifiable have been overwritten by the ageing itself.

Yes. Ask for years to be taken off instead and the same edit runs backwards — lines smoothed, hair restored to its earlier colour, the face fuller. Going backwards is usually the easier direction, because the model is removing information rather than inventing it.

No. It produces one plausible version, weighted by what faces in general do over time. Genetics, sun exposure, weight, smoking and luck decide the actual outcome, and none of them are visible in your photo. Treat the output as an illustration, not a forecast.

Because the prompt was read as a hair instruction. Ageing is a set of separate changes — skin texture, volume loss, lines, pigmentation, hair colour — and a vague request often lands on the most obvious one. Name the parts you want: deeper lines, thinner lips, age spots, a softer jawline, silver hair.

You can, and people do it in the other direction — taking years off an old family portrait to see a grandparent young. Ask permission where the person is alive to give it, and think before publishing an altered picture of someone who has not agreed to it.

The estimate appears before you generate and moves with the format and resolution you pick, so the cost is visible first. Failed runs are never charged, and new accounts start with free credits — enough to see the older version before spending anything.