// reference: https://stackoverflow.com/a/42705208/1477298
You can do a lot of fun stuff to collection views. I like to subclass UICollectionViewFlowLayout. Here is an example that fades the top and the bottom of the collection view based on distance from center. I could modify it to fade only the very edges but you should figure it after you look through the code.
import UIKit
class FadingLayout: UICollectionViewFlowLayout,UICollectionViewDelegateFlowLayout {
//should be 0<fade<1