The Japanese economy has hit the skids, but the slowdown hasn’t hampered cosmetics sales. Japan’s cosmetics industry has posted sales gains for 22 months straight. Fuji Keizai Institute, a Tokyo consultancy, predicts sales will edge up 3% this year, to $24 billion. (Fuji Keizai’s estimate of the market’s size is much higher than the government’s official $16.5 billion figure.) The trend is even more surprising because there are 1.8 million fewer Japanese in their 20s and 30s, typically the target audience for cosmetics companies, than there were a decade ago, according to an article in Business Week.

Even better, industry observers expect gains to continue in the new year. Department store operator Odakyu saw cosmetics sales at a shop in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district increase by 5% in October, after renovating the shop’s 2,100-square-meter cosmetics area. Takashimaya, another department store group, spent $5.5 million on its branch in the central Japanese city of Nagoya, to redo the interior and expand the cosmetics area. What’s selling? High-priced cosmetics, says Machiko Amano, an analyst covering the industry at Standard & Poor’s.

What explains the resilience? One reason is that as Japan’s society has aged, cosmetics makers have focused on wooing an older crowd, not just women in their 20s and early 30s. Kanebo has done that with its Chicca brand, producing eyeshadow and lipstick that can be applied quickly and simply by women in their 50s and 60s. The company has also doubled its efforts to train staff who deal with these customers. Rival Shiseido, meanwhile, launched a new brand called Elixir Prior which targets the over-60 set.

“Women in this generation have time and money,” says Seiko Yamazaki, a supervisor who’s watching consumer trends at Dentsu Institute. “They are the last major untapped consumer group.”