Variable Products and Category Pages and Redundant Content Penalties

I have a category page that has images of all my different colors, but all the images in this category pages link to one variable product page with their variation specified. This is done so that my customers can see the full color palette on the category page, but the product description is in only one place (the variable product) to avoid a redundant content penalty.

The problem is that my category page and my variant product page need to have more or less the same title and descriptive text. Of course, the variant product page has more detailed information, but there is some basic content that I want to appear on both pages to make sure my customers see it. (Years of customer service dictate that it must be both places.)

My questions:

Will Google penalize me for redundant content for this, or is their algorithm smart enough to understand the relationship between category and product pages?

What should I do to make them different without artificially writing different content?

I would love to see a good example.

Thanks,