sugarcoat

• sugar coat, sugar-coat

sugar +‎ coat; figurative sense from the practice of coating medicinal tablets or pills with sugar in order to disguise their unpleasant taste (sugarcoating the pill).

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈʃʊɡɚˌkoʊt/
• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈʃʊɡəˌkəʊt/
• Hyphenation: sug‧ar‧coat

sugarcoat (third-person singular simple present sugarcoats, present participle sugarcoating, simple past and past participle sugarcoated)

1. (transitive) To coat with sugar.
2. (transitive, figurative) To make superficially more attractive; to give a falsely pleasant appearance to.

   Synonyms: candy-coat, gild, gild the pill, sugarcoat the pill

   There's no way to sugarcoat the loss of the space shuttle; it was an unmitigated disaster.

   • 1876 November 1, Mark Twain, “Letter to Mr. Burrough, of St. Louis”, in The Letters Of Mark Twain,‎, volume 3:

     I went to the unheard-of trouble of re-writing the letter and saying the same harsh things softly, so as to sugarcoat the anguish and make it a little more endurable […]

   • 2022 March 23, Barack Obama, 2:52 from the start, in Centennial Celebration Conversation with President Barack Obama and Yo-Yo Ma‎, Chicago Council on Global Affairs, via YouTube:

     […] And I don't think we can sugarcoat both the human toll that is unfolding in Ukraine, but also how it is reordering the international architecture in ways that we haven't seen in decades.

• sugarcoat a bitter pill
• sugarcoated (adjective)
• sugarcoating (noun)