Quantum purity amplification (QPA) is the task of coherently transforming $n$ copies of a mixed state into high-fidelity copies of a chosen eigenstate. We develop a general theory of QPA for $n$ input copies, $m$ output copies, and arbitrary choices of target eigenstate, local dimension $d$, and input spectrum. We introduce the overhang-removal protocol, derive its all-site and one-site fidelities across output regimes, and show that it is optimal in several regimes, both asymptotically and nonasymptotically. For the asymptotic analysis, we use a path-graph parametrization to show that, when the target eigenvalue has a constant spectral gap $D_{k,min}$, achieving worst-case all-site error $\epsilon$ scales as $O(m/(\epsilon D_{k,min}^2))$. When $m/n$ approaches a constant, the performance exhibits phase-like regimes, which we characterize explicitly. For the nonasymptotic analysis, we develop a theory of generalized Young diagrams that yields tight sample complexity bounds and provides the first tight dimension-uniform guarantee for optimal QPA. We also provide asymptotically efficient implementations of the overhang-removal protocol. Together, these results establish QPA as a rigorous example of coherent quantum information processing with dimension-uniform sample complexity, supplying the technical foundation for the coherent-incoherent separation developed in the companion work.