Of course it can! 1. Commonsense: heat and trauma can cause broken blood vessels. IPL can provide both. Machine malfunction, wrong settings, etc. and you can obviously end up w/ more broken blood vessels than before IPL. 2. I AM LIVING PROOF. After my IPL tx, I have new, darker, more broken blood vessels, some in areas I did NOT HAVE any before. How do I know this? Because I had to cover up my broken vessels every day w/ mu, and I would put concealer on the ones that were noticeable. I know exactly where I had to put my concealer every morning. After the IPL, I had a lot of new ones, some in depressions that I sure as heck didn't have before. I also had some that were made darker and more extensive after the IPL. I also have before and after photos, which are not close up, but you can see a general increase in redness after the tx, as well as rosacea pustules in the after photo, which if were examined closely in person, would show those little "spider vein" clusters that are often found in rosacea pustules. In short, I got (a) immediate new broken blood vessels after IPL, and then (b) I got some more from a rosacea flare w/ pustules that was triggered by the IPL w/in 14 days of the IPL. So telling people that IPL "cannot" cause broken blood vessels is, in my opinion, wrong, and downright scary. FACTS and data should drive your advice, docs, and dogma is for religious issues. While perhaps you two have never personally seen this complication from an IPL, I'd be very surprised to find I am the only one on the planet to have experienced this effect.