repetitive content penalties robots meta-data tag

[preserver]

My site has lists of the same name of product with very small variations, so it is highly redundant.  I'm worried search engines will penalize this.  

 

I thought I could use a robots disallow in the metadata for the individual products to direct traffic to the category pages (with the lists of similar, but slightly different products).   

 

Should that work?  Or should I be using a robots file for the category pages to move traffic to the individual product pages instead?  

 

Is there anywhere to avoid penalization for the repetitive nature of the product names in the first place?  

Here is an example:  

Jump Rope 36" long, Red

Jump Rope 48" long, Green

 

I know it is a weird way to represent inventory, but I thought it would make it easier for users to compare prices for different combinations.  Also, the  product combinations generator didn't allow you to input totally independent prices for different combinations, and the prices are all independent of eachother.