If you put a gloss on a difficult situation, you describe it in a way that makes it seem better than it really is. He obviously tried to put a gloss on the poor sales figures. Yesterday they tried to put a gloss on the Home Office statistics by stressing that recorded crime had stabilised. Note: A gloss is an explanation that is added to a book or other text in order to explain an unfamiliar term. The idea here is that the explanation being given is a misleading one.