Hearing the word 小悪魔 used here and there, I had always foolishly assumed that the addition of that '小' in front, made it a much more harmless, playful, version of the real thing. And consequently, calling someone (with whom one is familiar enough, of course) '小悪魔', would be akin to using the literal equivalent in English, where nobody would ever be offended at being called a "little devil".
However, recent conversations have sown the seeds of doubt in my mind, and upon checking the dictionary (what I should have done earlier), I find that the official definition given by WWWJDIC is:
小悪魔 [こあくま] (n,adj-na) (col) rogue, devil, imp
... which has zero playfulness to it, and sounds about just as bad as calling somebody "Satan" or "the Devil" (悪魔 without 小).
My question is therefore:
How strong (and potentially offensive) is the word in a casual context? Does it have any of the "harmless naughtiness" overtones a clueless English speaker might expect from such a term?