How to use Purple Prose effectively?

I bring a much more boring topic today. I'm sorry.

I'd like to talk to you about purple prose, a literary term that's been given to a shockingly large amount of hobby-writers. From here on out referred to as PP because I'm a lazy sod and you can only type those words so many times before they lose all meaning. For those of you uninformed, here's a brief tidbit from mankind's greatest easily accessible resource for trivia;

Purple prose is a term of literary criticism used to describe passages, or sometimes entire literary works, written in prose so overly extravagant, ornate, or flowery as to break the flow and draw attention to itself. Purple prose is sensually evocative beyond the requirements of its context. It also refers to writing that employs certain rhetorical effects such as exaggerated sentiment or pathos in an attempt to manipulate a reader's response. ~Wikipedia (who else?)

Now let's throw down the cards. For starters, I despise PP. Or rather it's recently shown up in alarming quantities in books that I despise and it's the closest thing I can find to justify my scorn. Secondly, I apparently am a victim of it's beguiling ways and made a habit of having to prune through my text with great big gardening sheers to try and remedy this. Thirdly, PP is occasionally put into text, as the quote above says, to create a response from the reader, but managing this has been... a hurdle to say the least.

That's where the first sticking point presents itself. It is, by definition, using text so over done that it draws attention to the fact that it's so overly elaborate. This works well if you're trying to represent a character that's heads over heels in love with some one else to the point they've become a bit unbalanced, but can there be other applications? Is the only way this style of writing can be applied when the perspective of the writing is deranged or otherwise in a state that the writing can be used to draw attention to? Does this mean that PP can be useful, but only as a gimmick in the odd paragraph?

Hell if I know. I am trying a few experiments though.

How Canadians write novels.

Purple prose is actually kinda fun to write, you see. It's a hilariously over-wrought description of...well, everything if it gets bad enough, but if you can make it passable in your work you can actually slip a number of critical details into it. Little things about the scenery or people that wouldn't otherwise fit into the narrative. Using PP to set up something that'll become much more prominent or important later one is an idea I've been fiddling with for a while. It effectively hides those few real bits of information in a dump of worthless stuff, making it either the best use of Red Herrings possible or eliminating the need for them all together. I'm not certain which yet.

The big issue is finding a way to incorporate it into a story that doesn't come off as gimmicky, forced, or detract from the bigger picture. Since part of PP is inherently distracting I think it might be impossible to accomplish the last point, but minimizing it's effect should be doable. My best idea is working it into one of the major characters as a trait - perhaps giving perspective to a savant with photographic memory? It'd fit, and if it was a re-occurring perspective it wouldn't be a one-off thing, but rather a part of the story as a whole. Seeing the world through common eyes, and then again through the infinitely more detailed ones of the savant, portrayed basically with PP. Many works of mystery (and every other Law & Order) have characters with acute or different ways of seeing details, but never is the perspective given to them that I've run across. It might be interesting.

I'll try it with a couple short stories, who knows? Maybe I'll even post them here. My dog was never the best critic anyways.