(FORTUNE Magazine) – After gobbling up a slew of cosmetics companies during a five-year buying binge, the newest giants of the beauty industry, Procter & Gamble and Unilever, are in a digestive mode. Can firms hitherto spared rest easy? Absolutely not. The two acquisitive newcomers, each with cosmetics sales pushing $6 billion, now closely trail the global Goliath of cosmetics -- France's $7.4-billion-a- year L'Oreal. Small fry that have not yet folded into a megacompany may get trampled. Industry guru Allan Mottus, editor of the Informationist newsletter, notes that in 1993 U.S. sales of Unilever's Parfums International -- including Elizabeth Taylor's fragrance line -- increased 19%, while Oscar de la Renta perfumes took a 19% nosedive. De la Renta's scents are marketed by Sanofi Beaute, a small division of France's Elf Aquitaine. Says Mottus: "Sanofi does not have the heart for the business." Size matters in the U.S. as well, where 64% of the domestic market for department store cosmetics belongs to three firms -- L'Oreal, Unilever, and Estee Lauder. Lauder, with sales of $2.8 billion, along with Chanel, with estimated sales of $560 million, is a family-owned jewel that may never come up for grabs. Another desirable family-owned business is Benckiser, a $2.7 billion German outfit copying the big players in order to stay alive. Benckiser swooped into the industry in 1991 with purchases of two prestige brands, Monteil and Lancaster. The next year it bought Coty, the leading mass-market fragrance line in the U.S. In addition, CEO Peter Harf, 48, a Harvard-educated German, has backed a bouquet of new products with the same kind of marketing dollars the giants put up. Naysayers predicted Harf couldn't succeed, but in two short years he has increased Coty's profitability with several smash hits, including last year's mass-market winner, Vanilla Fields.