Panels in the l.h.s. display the mean values for the bulge’s mass-weighted stellar age ⟨t_⋆, B⟩_ℳ in Gyr, in each mass bin, in the case of no subtraction (gray), subtraction of a centrally depressed disk (red), subtraction of centrally flattened disk (green) and subtraction of exponential disk (blue). Panels at the r.h.s. display the mean estimated values for the bulge’s mass-weighted stellar metallicity ⟨Z_⋆, B⟩_ℳ in Z_⊙. The ellipses represent the standard deviation σ of the mean, providing an estimate on how spread are these estimates within each bin mass. Their semi-major and minor axes display the σ in M_⋆, B (in the x-axis) and the σ in ⟨t_⋆, B⟩_ℳ or ⟨Z_⋆, B⟩_ℳ (in the y-axis). The 1st panel contains an additional x-axis providing information on the average stellar mass for each bulge bin mass. From top to bottom: rows refer to the four spectral modeling runs. The horizontal dashed line indicates the maximum allowed value for the respective quantity and SSP library.