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It's only subjective to a point. There are many things that are almost uniformly considered attractive by the majority of the population. There was an AMA from

• cadlin 14y ago
  I looked through that thread and what struck me was how small the body of research the guy draws from is. Maybe he is only citing a small sample of the research, but there seems to be a lot of conclusions drawn from very few studies. Especially on something as subjective and political as human attraction. The top answer in the reddit thread discusses this (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1689917/pdf/10380676.pdf http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1689917/pdf/1038...) study. It says that women prefer the odor of more attractive men. The conclusions from that study are based on the odors of 6(!) different men. And the t-shirt the men wore to capture the odor are washed, frozen, and then heated in a bottle. The women then smell the bottle and make their judgement. The study doesn't bother to explain why these actions don't change the odor of the t-shirt (which they might not, but that doesn't seem obvious to me). There are other problems with the study, but I'll stop there. I understand that all fields of science have to start somewhere, but this seems closer to phrenology than particle physics.