In Defense of Mick Jagger’s Wrinkles

The Rolling Stones’ new AI-assisted video makes them look young again. But their real faces are the thing worth celebrating

Eric Spitznagel,

AARP

Comments

Published May 20, 2026

A portrait of musician Mick Jagger smiling while wearing a black blazer with white embroidery on the lapels over a dark shirt. He stands against a vibrant gradient background that transitions from teal to orange.

Mick Jagger in 2026. “It’s a face of magnificent character,” writes Eric Spitznagel. “It is, in every sense, a great face. A face that did not need a computer to improve it.”

Getty Images

The Rolling Stones released a new music video last week, and watching it produced a sensation I haven’t felt since I accidentally walked into the wrong high school reunion.

The song is called “In the Stars,” and in it, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood look exactly as they did in the late 1970s. They have smooth skin and sharp cheekbones, and those famous Jagger jowls are nowhere to be found. The effect is eerie and slightly wrong, like being flirted with by a wax figure at Madame Tussauds.

The technology behind it comes from an AI company called Deep Voodoo, which helped the band do what everybody’s aunt does when you try to take a group photo at Thanksgiving. They say, “Wait, let me put a filter on it first.”

I know many people love it. The YouTube comments I saw were mostly delighted. The Stones are young again! The future is amazing! Computers have finally solved the global emergency of Mick Jagger looking like Mick Jagger! But a few people seemed to feel what I felt.

“I prefer videos where the real Stones perform the song,” one commentator remarked. “No matter (that) they are old now.”

Amen, stranger, from the back pew of the Church of the Holy Jowl.

Let’s start with Jagger’s face. Not the 1978 version. The current one. The 82-year-old face that’s been photographed approximately 11 billion times since 1962, that has somehow survived everything the 20th century could throw at it and is still going.

Most Popular

A black-and-white archival photograph of a young Mick Jagger singing passionately into a microphone during a live outdoor performance. He has long, wind-blown hair, wears a leather jacket, and stands in front of guitarist Ronnie Wood, who is partially visible in the background.

The young Mick Jagger, captured here in 1975, already preparing his face for a long and distinguished second career as a national monument.

Fred W. McDarrah/The New York Historical/Getty Images

It’s a face of magnificent character. The lines run deep, they run everywhere, and every single one has a story. It is, in every sense, a great face. A face that did not need a computer to improve it.

Everything he’s experienced should be visible on that face. The miles. The scandals. The stadiums. The disco years. The punk years. The years when every British rock star dressed as either a pirate accountant or a haunted chimney sweep.

And consider what the Stones’ faces have witnessed collectively. They were there in December 1969, headlining a free concert at California’s Altamont Speedway that ended the 1960s in a single chaotic evening after a member of the Hells Angels stabbed an attendee to death. They were there through the 1970s, a decade that killed more rock stars than it graduated. In 1989 they launched their Steel Wheels tour, and a cartoonist sketched Jagger shuffling onstage using a walker.

The Stones, who were in their 40s to early 50s at the time, responded by playing for 6 million people across three continents. Every year since, someone has declared them too old. Every year since, they’ve continued not to be.

Keith Richards, who’s also 82, presents an even stronger case. Richards today looks like a man who’s spent six decades committing to every moment, dietary, pharmaceutical and otherwise, with no concern for the long-term structural consequences.

A color archival photograph of the Rolling Stones standing together on a stage with a red background. In the center, Mick Jagger wears sunglasses and a white T-shirt while holding a silver boombox up to a microphone. Around him, bandmates Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood, Bill Wyman, and Charlie Watts are smiling and talking into their respective microphones.

Mick Jagger holds a boombox in 1989, back when “AI-assisted” meant Keith Richards remembered where he put his cigarettes.

Ken Regan/Camera 5/Contour/Getty Images

These are not faces to be erased or “fixed.” These are faces to be celebrated and studied. The young Stones were beautiful, yes, but they were also young men behaving with that young-man combination of arrogance, good bone structure and poor planning.

The old Stones are something rarer. They are survivors in tight pants. They are living rebukes to every person who ever said rock ’n’ roll had an expiration date.

Somewhere right now, a grown adult is holding a phone slightly above eye level, tilting toward the merciful glow of a kitchen window, and asking an app to make them look less like someone who’s lived through the last 15 years and more like someone who’s been gently misted. This is normal now. We smooth the forehead. We sharpen the jaw. We whiten the eyes until we look like haunted porcelain dolls.

We don’t announce any of this, because announcing it would ruin the illusion. The filter is designed to arrive invisibly, like good tailoring or inherited money. We are all expected to understand that the face on the screen has been lightly negotiated.

The “In the Stars” video fits into a long and depressing tradition of telling people that the face they currently have is the wrong one. Even Jagger himself, the most famous frontman in rock ’n’ roll, who once told People magazine he’d rather be dead than sing “Satisfaction” at age 45, and who’s spent 37 years proving himself spectacularly wrong about that, has apparently gotten the same age-shaming memo as the rest of us.

And yes, I understand the argument. The song has a retro vibe. The video is a fantasy. The Stones have always played with image, myth, sexuality, danger and swagger, and they’re allowed to make whatever bizarre little AI house party they want. If Jagger wants to be digitally licked by Odessa A’zion while resembling his 1970s self, I’m not going to stand outside the studio with a clipboard and a whistle.

But it’s hard to ignore what’s missing. The Stones themselves were not actually in the room. The video’s credits list body doubles for all three members, meaning the actual 82-year-old Jagger watched a stranger get his face licked on his behalf and presumably called this a win.

A candid outdoor photograph of Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, and Ronnie Wood smiling and laughing together. On the left, Keith Richards wears a black beanie, round red sunglasses, and a patterned scarf. In the center, Mick Jagger wears dark sunglasses and a gold-striped suit jacket. On the right, Ronnie Wood wears sunglasses and a blue brocade blazer.

The Stones in 2026, offering the strongest possible argument against returning anyone’s face to factory settings.

GC Images/Getty Images

It seems to me that featuring his real face would’ve been stranger, braver and a thousand times more rock ’n’ roll. Because rock ’n’ roll was never supposed to be a skin care routine.

So here is my modest proposal. Next time, show us the real Stones. Let them be old. Let them be ancient. Let them be beautiful in the way only old rock stars can be. Mick Jagger’s face has earned the right to be Mick Jagger’s face. And if the internet can’t handle that, the internet can put on a filter.

%{postComment}%