Soaping up Liquid Glass: less transparency, more contrast
For those who find the fall 2025 Liquid Glass interface that Apple applied to all its operating systems a bit much—too transparent, too shiny, too hard to read or interpret stuff through layers—Apple introduced a new option in its 26.1 releases in early November to dial things back.
This choice can bump down the glassification of Apple’s interfaces. The overlap of type, search fields, toolbars, and other objects now has a bit more solidity at each layer, reducing transparency, and making them easier to read on their own. It also reduces the interference of multiple overlapping bits of interface, image, and type, so you can visually interpret something without puzzling out which layer it’s on.
The Tinted option only goes so far. Apple already added a slider for Liquid Glass for Lock screens in its 26.2 releases, already out in beta—maybe that will extend further? For now, you can combine Accessibility options on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac to dial in more precisely how you want Liquid Glass to appear.
I can see clearly now
I originally found Liquid Glass almost offensively illegible and shiny. I thought I’d never get used to it. But Apple refined the interface through what must have been an enormous amount of feedback, with the release version—particularly in Tahoe—dialing down and working around some of the worst interactions.
However, there’s still a lot of room for improvement, where type overlaps images or translucent fields or buttons are too see-through to see easily.
The 26.1 releases of iOS, iPadOS, and macOS offer relief in Settings: Display & Brightness on an iPhone or iPad or System Settings: Appearance on a Mac. The option is shown via the Liquid Glass label, with a small simulated preview to help visualize the change. Clear is selected by default, and represents the default Liquid Glass as implemented in the 26.0 releases. Tinted reduces transparency a little—it varies by element and layer—and increases contrast slightly.
In the 26.2 betas of iOS and iPadOS, you can see a different approach to tuning Liquid Glass on the Lock screen editor. With your device locked, tap the screen to wake it, then touch and hold the lock screen, tap Customize, and tap the time elements. You now see a slider below the typeface selection and Glass and Solid buttons at the bottom of the view. Use the slider to control intensity or tap Solid to remove the Glass effect entirely.
Tahoe does have one additional trick up its sleeve with Safari—and in previous versions of macOS that support Safari 26 or later. The current foreground tab in a Safari window passes the dominant color scheme of the page you’re visiting onto the entire upper bar of the interface. In Safari: Settings: Tabs, uncheck “Show color in tab bar” to have the standard interface color and contrast.
Accessibility options
Two options found in Accessibility can give you more vividly distinct results. Both interact with the Clear and Tinted options for Liquid Glass. These options are Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast. You almost certainly have read about these features with the release of the fall 2025 operating systems, because they provided the only real ways to mitigate Liquid Glass.
With the 26.1 releases, you can combine Clear and Tinted with the above in a sort of matrix I show in the image below for iOS (and iPadOS by extension). Use Settings: Accessibility: Display & Text Size on iPhone or iPad, and System Settings: Accessibility: Display on a Mac. In Tahoe, enabling Increase Contrast also forces Reduce Transparency to turn on and locks it in that state. Not every combination of Clear and Tinted with those Accessibility settings appears differently, so I’ve listed only the ones that are distinct.
The Clear and Tinted options produce far less difference in Tahoe and on an iPhone or iPad. I’d use Accessibility display options on top of Tinted to get the best outcome. I find the Dock in Tahoe particularly irritating because of how Liquid Glass has made its outline illegible. Only using Increase Contrast provides what I’d like there.
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing (Aperiodical LLC) and How Comics Are Made (Andrews McMeel Publishing).]
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