The gift needs to be able to come off as a genuine gift so there’s some plausible deniability…
Edit: Just so it’s clear, this is purely hypothetical. I just thought of the idea and thought it would be funny to see what a random person on Lemmy might think. This isn’t a serious request and none of the suggestions will ever actually be used.
That really depends on the person and what they perceive as an insult.
A gift card for a shop that sells cringe stuff only
Birthdays: birthday cake flavored vodka (implies they are a drunk)
Get them soap and instructions about maintaining proper hygiene.
Decades ago, my mother worked with a small group of women. Every day they spent a few hours together in the office before going out. There was one lady with lacking personal hygiene, quite whiffy and rather oblivious about that. It was about that time the stick deodorants became available in our post soviet country, I believe the Speedstick was the first brand to take the market. So for Christmas for secret santa they got her the deodorant. It was a passive aggressive move, the things could have gone really wrong. She was happy with the gift but the things didn’t improve much. The following year they got her another stick deodorant, hoping to get the message through. She unwrapped the gift and excitedly thanked them, saying that the previous one was almost finished. Bless her, she only used it as a perfume on special occasions…
The best way is the one where you know lots of (not so well-known) context and circumstances, and then it can work as an insult, but you can deny some of the knowledge and therefore you can appear innocent.
