Starting with the latter, how should a desk be rated as clean? Is it clean when there is nothing on it? If so, it is hardly serving its purpose as a desk. The quality of the tools reflect the quality of the workman; an empty desk in an intellectual occupation suggests nothing more than that the head of the one who sits at it is similarly vacuous. A desk in use will show signs of its utility; scuffs, papers, and notes. It will be speckled with stains from the food eaten at it in moments of necessity, its color tainted from the markings caused by the glasses left on it in a hurry. For these reasons, the white shoes and spotless sweaters of the self-styled perfectionist do not betray the quality of perfectionism.

What is at stake here is the very meaning of the word. A perfectionist would care about the precise meanings of words. In this case, I'll start with the word "perfect," which means "being entirely without fault or defect." It comes from the Latin perfectere, a verb meaning "to carry out, perfect." From this etymology it is clear that the intention of the word "perfection" is to convey the idea of "something carried out to its end." To say that a thing is the mark of perfection is to say that it is the mark of something being complete.

Completeness is important to understand in the context of perfection. A pair of white shoes is complete when nothing further can be added to it in order to make it more of a pair of white shoes. I'm not familiar with the art of cobbling, so I'll move my analogy to something many are familiar with: assembling an Ikea bookcase. At the various stages of its construction, the bookcase cannot be called perfect. It is not yet carried out. Once the final pin is pushed in (and also, in the case of assembling Ikea furniture, the final curse word is uttered) it is called complete. Now complete, it is perfect.

The confusion lies in mistaking perfection with purpose. The purpose of the Ikea bookcase is to hold books. Over time, it will suffer the usual wear and tear to which, lamentably, all furniture is subject to, and ultimately its condition might be in such disrepair and dereliction as to tempt one to deem the once proud Ikea Lammarp no longer the acme of perfection but instead worthy only of the humble descriptor "imperfect". But is the bookcase actually imperfect? It is not, and there is a more common and apt word to describe it: used. 

While I've certainly met imperfect car salesmen, it's not common to buy an imperfect car. Our species prefers the much kinder, and apt, treatment "used". We have used cars, used books, secondhand clothing, hand-me-downs, and more. These are never called imperfect in common language, and correctly so, for they are not "imperfect." Perfection is the state of having been carried out. If the carrying-out was done with the object of producing a tangible artifact to be used for another purpose, then the carrying-out is not to blame for the tangible artifact having suffered the effects of doing the carrying-out of its own purpose. A truck with fifty thousand miles on it does not suffer a blemish to its reputation for having scratches in its bed; indeed, it would be a more successful truck if it did, as the scratches would be proof that the truck is capable of carrying out the duties for which it was designed. Likewise, a new truck isn't perfect because it doesn't have problems. Only testing it in practice can prove its capability. A new truck is perfect only in the sense that its construction has been carried out to completion - it is for no other reason than that.

A true perfectionist, based on everything described earlier, is one who perfects things in the sense of bringing them to completion. A perfectionist is one who carries out some project to its desired conclusion. 

Many self-proclaimed perfectionists are simply no where near being a perfectionist. They assume that removing decorations and artifacts of work from their desks is perfection. They imagine, hilariously, that spotless court sneakers are evidence of their perfectionism. But I've seen perfectionists, real ones. Being perfect is dirty work. A perfectionist, in the true sense, would not be clean or tidy. Those are other qualities, entirely unrelated to the concept of perfectionism. 

A true perfectionist is dirty, because a perfectionist is simply a person who gets things done according to the original vision.

Gamers have their own term for perfectionism, which, unsurprisingly, is a much better fit for what perfectionism claims to describe. The term completionist in gaming refers to one who seeks to play a game to its completion. Completionists aim to complete a game to its fullest degree, grabbing every coin, completing every mission, finding every cave, collecting every weapon, etc, and all this to a full 100%. These completionist gamers have captured the spirit of perfectionism I described earlier - that perfectionism in its pure form is more concerned with carrying out to completion some objective or goal.

Those who typically bestow the appellation perfectionist onto themselves, on the other hand, are far from the gaming completionists. The self-styled perfectionist wants clean shoes, an empty desk, and a spotless car. This is not the behavior of a perfectionist, but of a preservationist. Most of the perfectionists of our time are merely preservationists, indistinguishable from the art museum specialists working to preserve the great works of Renaissance artists except in the vast difference in the worth of their chosen objects of preservation.