Currently, there are no standardized, objective, and clinically applicable methods to predict the outcome of pulsed dye laser (PDL) therapy on capillary vascular malformation (CVM) patients. The introduction of a method that can predict the outcome prior to treatment will be valuable for both the patients and the doctors. In this study, the authors treated CVM with 595-nm wavelength PDL in Chinese patients (n = 686) and analyzed the efficacy of treatment and complications retrospectively in a 5-year period. Nearly 18 % of patients (n = 122) had 76 % or more clearing of lesions; over 52 % of patients (n = 360) had more than 50 % of clearing. The lesions in head and neck region had the best effective rate (58.3 %), followed by trunk (42.9 %) and extremities (35.6 %). The efficacy of PDL therapy is related to age, type, and location of lesions. Fifty-seven patients (8.3 %) had complications, including 2.0 % blistering (n = 14), 4.5 % hyperpigmentation (n = 31), 1.3 % hypopigmentation (n = 9), and 0.4 % hypertrophic scarring (n = 3). Based on these preliminary data, the authors established a standardized, objective, and clinically applicable equation that may be applied to predict the efficacy of 595 nm PDL therapy on a newly diagnosed Chinese CVM patients based on the age, type, and location of lesions.