The paper presents a comparison between compacted and reconstituted soils in terms of microstructure, and hydraulic and mechanical response. It is commonly assumed that reconstituted and compacted soils exhibit a fundamentally different behaviour due to different microstructures. However, the variety of pore size distributions observed in both compacted and reconstituted/natural soils suggests that the boundary between compacted and reconstituted states is more blurred. In the paper, an attempt is made to recognize similarities and differences between compacted and reconstitutes states based on a number of recent experimental studies where the microstructure and the hydraulic and mechanical behaviour of unsaturated soils in compacted and reconstituted states have been investigated. This exercise will also offer the opportunity to gain a better insight into the microstructure of compacted soils.