Why std::u16string is slower than array of char16_t?

After some performance experiments, it seemed that using char16_t arrays may boost performance sometimes up to 40-50%, but it seems that using std::u16string without any copying and allocations should be as fast as C arrays. However, benchmarks are showing the opposite.

Here is the code I've written for benchmark (it uses Google Benchmark lib):

#include "benchmark/benchmark.h"
#include <string>

static std::u16string str;
static char16_t *str2;

static void BM_Strings(benchmark::State &state) {
    while (state.KeepRunning()) {
        for (size_t i = 0; i < str.size(); i++){
            benchmark::DoNotOptimize(str[i]);
        }
    }
}

static void BM_CharArray(benchmark::State &state) {
    while (state.KeepRunning()) {
        for (size_t  i = 0; i < str.size(); i++){
            benchmark::DoNotOptimize(str2[i]);
        }
    }
}

BENCHMARK(BM_Strings);
BENCHMARK(BM_CharArray);

static void init(){
    str = u"Various applications of randomness have led to the development of several different methods ";
    str2 = (char16_t *) str.c_str();
}

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
    init();
    ::benchmark::Initialize(&argc, argv);
    ::benchmark::RunSpecifiedBenchmarks();
}

It shows the following result:

Run on (8 X 2200 MHz CPU s)
2017-07-11 23:05:57
Benchmark             Time           CPU Iterations
---------------------------------------------------
BM_Strings         1832 ns       1830 ns     365938
BM_CharArray        928 ns        926 ns     712577

I'm using clang (Apple LLVM version 8.1.0 (clang-802.0.42)) on mac. With optimizations turned on the gap is smaller but still noticeable:

 Benchmark             Time           CPU Iterations
---------------------------------------------------
BM_Strings          242 ns        241 ns    2906615
BM_CharArray        161 ns        161 ns    4552165

Can someone explain what's going on here and why there is a difference?

Updated (mixing the order and added few warm-up steps):

Benchmark             Time           CPU Iterations
---------------------------------------------------
BM_CharArray        670 ns        665 ns     903168
BM_Strings          856 ns        854 ns     817776
BM_CharArray        166 ns        166 ns    4369997
BM_Strings          225 ns        225 ns    3149521

Also including compile flags I'm using:

/usr/bin/clang++ -I{some includes here} -O3 -std=c++14 -stdlib=libc++ -Wall -Wextra -isysroot /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.12.sdk -O3 -fsanitize=address -Werror -o CMakeFiles/BenchmarkString.dir/BenchmarkString.cpp.o -c test/benchmarks/BenchmarkString.cpp