There's a lovely and romantic classic song that goes, "Smoke gets in your eyes." If you can, that's a situation you want to avoid. And it should be revised a bit to tell how smoke not only gets in your eyes, but in your ears, your nose, and your mouth to causes all sorts of painful, annoying, and possibly very serious problems.
Cataracts are quite common as people age, but smoking cigarettes can put you at heightened risk. Cigarette smoke can damage the proteins in the eye that help the lenses, the parts that focus light, maintain their transparency. With cataracts, the lens of the eye becomes cloudy and the vision is impaired.
Smoke can also irritate the Eustachian tubes in the ears and lead to otitis media, better known as earaches. If you are subjecting your children to secondhand smoke, you are making them more susceptible to painful ear infections. Smoke can also clog up the sinus passages and cause sinusitis, and smoke can make the gums more vulnerable to the types of bacteria that can cause gingivitis or gum
disease. This inflammation of the gums can eventually lead to tooth loss and bad breath.