My Week of Transparent Living With Apple’s ‘More Clear’ Liquid Glass Setting

I scroll on my phone, sipping on an overpriced espresso tonic at a San Francisco café. I watch as glassy notifications pop up on my home screen, one after another, distorting the top row of app icons in neat succession. Similar to how the glass in my hand refracts the coffee’s colors, the warping effect of Apple’s Liquid Glass tugs at the edges of whatever's behind each notification, disappearing a second later. Apple dropped the public beta for iOS 27 in mid-July, with the software’s full release expected in September. The beta version of iOS includes a new slider for adjusting Liquid Glass’s appearance across your iPhone. Apple’s translucent operating system was polarizing when it launched in 2025, with some criticizing how the design impacted text legibility. In response, Apple rolled out updates that tampered with the Liquid Glass effect, making the smartphone interface more opaque. With iOS 27, Apple gives users the option to make Liquid Glass even more transparent than its default. In the current public beta, this choice is available in Settings under the Appearance tab. If you tap on Liquid Glass here, you can drag it to the left for a more transparent experience. Fear not—if you don’t feel the same way as I do about transparency—you can drag that same slider to the right and boost the overall opacity of Liquid Glass. There’s still the option to Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast as well. I immediately cranked my settings to maximum clarity after I downloaded the public beta and left the setting on for a week to get the full experience. I understand why some prefer the heavily tinted version or need to switch it for accessibility reasons, yet I reveled in the warped colors and characters as I experienced Liquid Glass in its clearest glory. Early during my tests, I found myself slowly scrolling up and down on my Slack messages, watching as the names of Slack rooms refracted behind the menu bar at the bottom of my smartphone screen. I watched as the letters curled into meaningless lines and then reformed, unharmed, on the other side. The more I stared, the more whimsical it felt, and the more I appreciated Apple’s glassy design risk. The “more clear” option also added an increased depth to my device—reminiscent of an Apple update from more than a decade ago, in iOS 7, that you likely haven’t thought about in a minute: 3D apps. Apple added a parallax wallpaper effect during the iPhone 5’s heyday that used the smartphone’s gyroscope to make it appear as if app icons on your home screen floated slightly above the background, visibly shifting to the phone’s tilt. Both Liquid Glass and 3D app icons gave the iPhone a more tactile sense of dimensionality. “Translucency, parallax, animation, and motion (like a weather app showing falling snow) give the system a dive-in quality that it didn't have before. It appears three-dimensional in some ways,” wrote former WIRED staffer Mat Honan about Apple’s announcement of its iOS 7 redesign. I experienced a similar “dive-in quality” when I cranked up the transparency of Liquid Glass in iOS 27. Halfway through my week of testing, this option started to look so normal to me that I worried I had accidentally reset my phone to the default and checked my settings to ensure “more clear” was still enabled. It was. Which was a relief, and a sign I’d adjusted to this clearer version of Liquid Glass even faster than anticipated. If anything, the glassy effect became quite easy to ignore most of the time as I used my device. The clearest design elements of Liquid Glass often seemed relegated to menu bars or other smaller details near the edges of my screen. So, the legibility of what I was attempting to read was rarely impacted. Often, I would notice Liquid Glass warping words and colors out of the corner of my eye as I used my iPhone. This transparency toggle is not as flashy a change as others available in the current iOS 27 beta, most notably the Siri assistant overhaul. Even so, this clear-minded update was delightful to try, and I’m keeping up with my transparent lifestyle even after the weeklong experiment ended. I don’t mind if my smartphone functions more like a beautiful piece of art at times rather than always prioritizing utility—clearly.