Why? The op asked which was cuter, not which you'd want to have sex with.
Grown people talking about that even without mentioning sex...it just disturbs me when it involves kids. Seems wrong.
P.S.: Where I come from the age of consent is definitely 18.
I don't even know why I'm still debating this, but ok, here it goes, again.
The imaginary number of 18 is a line drawn in the sand by the government, and all it says is you can't have sexual intercourse with persons below this age. That is it. It doesn't have anything to do with beauty or maturity or emotional readiness for sex or anything.
Why is it right to think that at 18 we can say someone his cute. But at 17 we cannot. Does 12 months or less really make that much difference that we are magically different as soon as that hour rolls by that makes us 18? No, I don't think so. We just use the number provided by the law because we have no other way to measure maturity. There are plenty of teens under 18 that are more mature than 20 year olds, and vice versa. Maturity is an individual thing, and no general number applied can account for everyone.
Obviously, we all here will obey by the law. The law says nothing about admiring beauty. It is only about sex. Believe it or not it is ok to think someone is pretty or cute without thinking of sexing them. No where in the OPs post was sex or sexual intercourse mentioned. No laws or rules have been broken.