The Eastern Approach
The standard piercing aftercare has nothing to do with saline at all. Instead, a lot of piercing shops and families send you home with a small tube of antibiotic eye ointment, usually erythromycin, to dab on the piercing a couple times a day.
It's not a fringe thing, it's genuinely common, often passed down from parents and grandparents the same way saline gets passed down as the default in the West. The logic makes sense on the surface too: eye ointment is formulated for one of the most sensitive tissues on your body, so it feels like a safe, gentle choice for an ear.
So How Should You Care For Your Piercings?
Honestly, both saline and antibiotic eye ointment traditions come from real, lived experience, and neither one was invented out of nowhere. But if you're asking what's currently recommended by professional piercers today in the US, it's saline, precisely because of how it interacts with healing skin. If you grew up with the eye ointment method and it's worked for you, that's real too, just know that current professional guidance has shifted, and a light touch matters more than the product itself.
Either way, skip the harsher stuff entirely, alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, and tea tree oil included. And whatever you clean with, pairing it with implant grade titanium or nickel free gold takes a lot of the guesswork out of the rest.